It actually impacts a lot of theories, and definitely, just 'slashing some numbers' like a wal-mart price rollback is not all tht people should expect.
Fred Hoyle's work would be the most obvious. Hoyle was the first physicist to model nucleosynthesis in stars (1948).* His theory there still seems sound (or the math behind it does, and the US, the British, and the former Soviet Union all spent more money testing some of that math than on all other scientific research ever funded by those governments, put together), and one implication is that Oxygen and all the other heavier elements, were produced almost exclusively in stars, not in the big bang. The current age of the sun, and it's projected lifespan, are both based partly on putting the mis-measured amount of Oxygen into Hoyle's equations.
Hoyle is also known for having proposed a lot of rather odd theories later in his career, including some revised steady state theories, panspermia hypothisi, and so on. Some of those are based partly on his earlier math, and it's at least possible that this discovery will make some of the 'nutbar' Hoyle ideas less 'nutbar'. Hoyle's theories are even cited by some as real, solidly scientific proof of intelligent design. The impact there, whether it's real science or misinterpretation, would doubtless be phenominal, even (eu)catastropic.
* There's actually a number of others involved, people such as Fowler, Chandrasekhar, the Alpher/Bethe/Gamow gang, and still others - I'm simplfying a bit in giving Sir Fred all the credit.
Anyway, the sun may be less far along it's lifespan than we thought, possibly farther from the Helium Flash/red giant stage. (It still just about has to be about 5 billion years old, because independant geologic evidence suggests the earth is about 4.5 billion years old itself). So if the sun, and presumably related stars age more slowly than thought, then this possibly changes both supernova abundance and predicted spectrum and mass ratio numbers, and we have used those numbers to estimate the distance to distant galaxies, and the overall size and age of the universe.
It's even quite possible that this change in Oxygen numbers means our estimates of the mass of the universe, it's age, and so on are all skewed, and super-novae may happen less frequently so that will also reduce our accuracy of measurement and mean it will take us longer to get enough new data to check the new predictions to the same accuracy as the ones we now doubt. Thus, this news not only predicts we may have to revise a lot of figures, but that it will be a bit harder to do it right than it appeared the first time.
All the 'new physics bits', i.e. 'dark matter', 'dark energy', etc. all need refigured if the age and mass of the universe get refigured significantly. Some of them may be superfluous. Some new ideas may be needed. Yes, this could just possibly be that big (although it may well be much less significant in the end).
I'd like to ask why someone always trots out some definition of "stealing", "theft", or similar words in these arguments, that isn't a legal definition. Right now, this is a matter of law. It will end up being settled by lawyers and courts, using the legal definitions of words like theft only. These other definitions don't matter.
Do any of the people offering these other definitions plan to challenge the court, by filing suit before a higher court to get the decisions to follow their offered definition? Are they petitioning their representitives to make their definitions law of the land? No? Then they don't really mean their own rhetoric.
The RIAA and MPAA individual members have all, without one single exception, lost at least one suit, filed by an artist or multiple artists, where the corporations were caught concealing the true status of profits, under-reporting gross or net take, and/or over-reporting expenses, billing for expenses not actually incurred, double, triple, and even quadruple billing. In several of these cases they have committed such large numbers of 'convenient mistakes all just happening to fall their way' that the judges deciding those cases have freely used terms such as "egregious", "willful" and even "rising to a level that is undoubtedly criminal" in their decisions. Last I heard how the law is supposed to work, contract fraud is supposed to be illegal, even with no armed force involved.
Yes, you could possibly justify an anti-trust argument, but how about this broader one. If artists are still entering into contracts with a group of companies that have all been caught cheating on contracts, there must be some unfair advantage to keep them doing it. Whether it's a monopolistic trust that leaves them no better options, or the group otherwise enjoys selective immunity from paying the full price of their contract violations is irrelevant. The government could vigorously prosecute where conduct crosses the line to criminal accounting practices, lieing under oath, and so on, and this would help a great deal whether there is a proven monopoly or not.
Sure, some of it, at least a little, can be blamed on various artist's stupidity. Put a clause in your recording contract that says there will be bowls of all green M&Ms available at all times on the soundstage, and you can expect to pay very dearly for it. Fair enough, but not nearly all the artists are that stupid. Which seems more likely, that there are so many artists too stupid to realize the risks, or that many of them do know they are going to get screwed, but feel like all better alternatives are closed off to them, and hope to be the one who isn't screwed too badly.
Prior post amounts to saying "show me a successful white collar criminal who turned to blue collar methods when they didn't have to, or agree I'm right!" I'm rather surprised you're rebutting only one part of it and letting the rest stand.
I see your first point, but how in the hell did you get the idea that a CEO could be "never directly responsible"? That's a marvelously narrow definition of the word directly, it stands utterly opposed to the way that phrase is used in all the body of both corporate law and US criminal law, and if it's your real logical position, then you should be equally opposed to holding the getaway car driver responsible for a homicide resulting from a bank robbery, since he too is not directly responsible. Are you sure you want to fling around terms such as "batshit insane"?
The problem I have with this is that classical music does get public subsidies, and those pay, at the very least, for the musicians to practice, train, and acquire reputations that make the sales of their reproduced music possible. In many cases, the subsidies buy recording gear, pay the light and heat bills for the halls during the recording process, and otherwise figure more directly into actually producing CDs. We* are funding parts of the production process.
*(meaning everyone, in the US, who lives in a local venue where classical music ticket sales are not subject to the entertainment tax but it is applied to other musical performances tickets, or those where it recieves a share of the local taxes as a subsidy, or where it gets federal grants - those there conditions together describe almost all classical performers, with a few possible exceptions such as the NBC orchestra).
There are supposed to be checks and balances, just as there are for government subsidized public TV programming. What we've seen there though, is the government does a favor for a friend in the industry. Even if taxes pay to develop a show such as Sesame Street or Barney, when the government auctions off merchandising rights and such, they go for absurdly low sums to insiders who make most of the money, instead of a deal where the taxpayers actually stand a chance of getting their investment back. While some local and state governments have been a bit more responsible with classical music, there are definite insider deals there as well.
So, as you put it, it's not so bad. It could be more equitable, more efficient, and generally better though.
I think having the anon. option is sensible. However, the coward descriptor needs to be taken at least partly as humor. I'm willing to stand behind my posts if anyone wants to bother to link my real name to my net-o-nym, but let's face it, only a fool never changes an opinion, and only a bigger fool judges someone solely by a post they may have made as a much younger or less informed person. The problem is, we have people running companies or engaging in politics, who are just such fools. Who wants to be judged by someone who is a. an unidentified lurker, b. not openly engaging in the discussion or revealing any of their own opinions, c. giving the poster no chance to clarify or revise their remarks and d. willing to treat a single phrase from a single post made years ago as the only evidence to be allowed in that judgement.
I certainly hope posters (including you) will show the courage of their convictions somewhere, but it's not fair to assume cowardice, any more than it would be to say anyone who won't stand on a soapbox in a public park before a crowd obviously filled with drunken hecklers, just to make his opinions known is a coward. Sometimes you just think another venue may be more productive, or want to debate on the peaks instead of in the valleys.
To all you peple who have been argueing that copyright violation is theft, and saying all those 'clever' things about how the people who oppose the RIAA really merely want to steal copies, etc. - By your own logic, the RIAA is now obviously and openly a criminal organization, that wants to commit FRAUD with impunity, and so ALL of you who support it are also Liars, Cheats, Con-artists, Carney Shills, and most of all, FELONS. No-good, Criminal, Scum! You cons all deserve the chair, if we can figure out how to get your high horses in there under you. Let's call it waht it IS! Let's call ALL the criminals what they ARE!
If there is any Irony, it's not so much the porn industry's actions, but the anti-piracy fight from the rest of the industry. The RIAA and MPAA started pushing terms like theft and piracy to influence the mainstream consumers, and a lot of their advertizing is aimed at 'wholesome family values' types. (Like the movie adds that say "You wouldn't steal a purse..." - last time I saw it, I looked around the theatre and realized a couple of the people in there probably paid for the ticket that way). What's ironic is that this puts middle america on the side of protecting all industral IP, including porn. It's like the drug laws - Individual dope dealers may not like the drug laws, but organized crime has figured out how to exploit the existing drug laws so well that they actually like them, and so supporting the existing situation puts 'the forces of goodness and niceness' on the same side as the Mob.
The Clinton Era assault weapons ban doesn't ban assault weapons. Instead it bans some weapons that look like assault weapons. (I'm assuming both you and the original poster are writing about the Violent Crime Control and law Enforcement Act of 1994, and not the "Brady" act, which, from a weapon standpoint, was only about handguns).
While there are parts of the law that actually focus in part or even mostly on the potential of a weapon to kill large numbers, i.e. magazine capacity restrictions, the law also affects integral flash supressors and weapons designed to fit one, folding stocks, bipod mounts, and barrel shrouds (a device whose sole purpose is to prevent people from getting burned by a hot barrel). None of those things has much, if any, relation to the weapon's criminal use potential. You could argue that a flash supressor makes it harder for a police sniper to spot a well concealed assault weapon wielder, for example, but that's a real stretch. By the very same 'logic' congress used in debate, the government could have 'justified' banning weapons that don't sufficiently often blow up in the user's face! (After all, there would be fewer 'successful' Columbine imitations if there was a 1 in 4 chance of the shooter himself dieing every time he pulled the trigger).
I don't know if I would call the ban an evil act, but it's at the least a pretty incompetent piece of legislation.
YRO is overused as a class, but there is something to rights arguements about trained dogs, etc. that whole pesky "Unreasonable Search and Seizure" clause in the U. S. Constitution implies that some searches are more reasonable than others. Dogs provide an extension of search capabilities. So do X-Ray scans, cavity searches, DNA tests, retasking military grade spy sats to look for pot plantations, or compulsory urine testing. Dogs at customs are generally considered a reasonable search tool for the kinds of things customs has to detect.
BUT, customs is generally charged with detecting some very odd things, such as livestock or pets that are not normally illegal to own, but are illegal to import, and with detecting drugs. Checking for bootleg CDs has certain implications that can't be avoided in this context. First, the society is assuming that catching this particular form of copyright violation is roughly on a par with catching heroin smuggling. That's pretty damned strongly implied if we put similar amounts of money into training dogs for both (and if anything, it's cheaper to train a dog to detect several related opiates and other drugs than it is one plasticiser*). Second, discovering CDs proves nothing, unless the humans associated with the dogs can make a proper determination that the CDs aren't legal ones. That implies we (as a society) are devoting resources to training the human customs agents in telling bootleg CDs from legitimate ones, AT A TIME WHEN WE HAVE SERIOUS DOUBTS ABOUT THEIR TRAINING IN DETECTING INCOMING TERRORISTS WITH WMDS!
* I've actually helped local law enforcement train drug and explosive sniffing dogs. It's difficult fun to try and outwit a well trained sniffer dog, and I have no doubts at all they can be trained to accurately find polycarbonate plasticizers, but I really, seriously doubt it's as easy as training them for much more aromatic explosive nitrate compounds, and that is weeks or months of work. Typical training involves taking the dogs to an unfamiliar location, which means setting aside a national guard armory, old courthouse or other state owned building, often for several days, and having about 20 people previously unknown to the dogs available to plant the 'evidence'. You can't use just one or two people over and over or the dog starts using their scent markers to shortcut training. Instead you have to have several people take turns, hand off packages to each other, and otherwise mix things up so the dog trains properly on the chemical desired. That can be 20 people on a payroll all day even if they are going to actually do only 15 minutes work each, and this is far from cheap.
First, the IAU doesn't want to call Xena, Saedna, et. al. asteroids at all. Rather they proposed the term "minor planet". There are no longer any rules for naming asteroids, because the term 'asteroids' itself is now considered a layman's term. There are thus absolutely no official understandings about naming "asteroids". There certainly were some back when the term itself was acceptable, but they were not what you apparently think they were. Certainly, the IAU didn't decide to drop the term asteroids, and then replace the old rules for naming them with an informal understanding - they made more rules, not fewer.
According to the current rules (re. minor planets) of the International Astronomical Union, political and military names may not be used until a century after the event or the death of the person in question. Nor may names be obscene, in bad taste, too similar to any existing name, or more than 16 letters long.
The 'too similar' clause above means the IAU can't officially support the proposed renaming of Xena to Eris, by the way - it's too similar to Eros. So right now, a department of the IAU has shot down the very name the body of the whole tried to make official after officially clarifying that Xena was always unofficial just in case anyone said differently. As it stands, Eris is the official unofficial name (unofficially), Xena is the unofficial official name (but that's at least official), and you're technically argueing that what's unofficially official is more unofficial than what's officially unofficial. (Granted, you may be right).
It is also considered bad form for discoverers to name minor planets after themselves or their pets. There is a 10 year moratorium after discovery on anyone else besides the discoverer naming aminor planet, so only Eris' discover can suggest an alternative for another 5 years or so if Eris is rejected. Taking these rules into account, the relevant committee of the IAU (of which there are several) decides on the name. If they had just counted it as a damned planet, they could automatically rename it if they don't accept Eris, but now their own rules mean an official rejection puts the ball back in the discoverer's court.
There are some older traditions which apparently still apply to what used to be asteroids in special types of orbits. For example, ones which come inside the orbit of the Earth are still usually named for characters from Greek mythology; examples include (1862) Apollo, (2101) Adonis, (4341) Poseidon and (5731) Zeus. A subset of these objects are those which actually have orbits smaller than that of the Earth; these are usually given names out of Egyptian mythology, for example, (2062) Aten and (3554) Amun. Minor planets which come near to, but don't cross, the Earth's orbit are often given names out of Aztez or Inca mythology, for example, (1915) Quetzalcoatl and (1980) Tezcatlipoca.
Several minor planets have been discovered which lead or trail the planet Jupiter in gravitationally stable points ("Lagrangian" points). These were collectively named the "Trojan" asteroids and were always named after figures from the Trojan War; examples include (588) Achilles, (911) Agamemnon, and (1143) Odysseus. This may be still a rule, or may indeed be just a tradition. The IAU is officially unofficial about that too.
Certainly - tangleing with the Nazgul is just plain dumb if you are not mighty among the first born. (I won't go into why IBM's legal dept. is sometimes called the Nazgul here, but that metaphor's been around for decades). Darl should have looked into a mirror, and in his best Dirty Harry imitation voice, asked himself "Are you a 3,000 year old elflord who's feeling lucky? Well, are you, punk?", before ever considering suing IBM.
I appreciate being modded funny above, but I meant it in a half-serious way. If SCO is facing trouble with the IRS, it will come as a spin-off result of a prior SEC investigation, so we, the general public, will not hear one single solitary word about it until at least a few weeks after the SEC announces something. If it's going on right now, we may know in a year or so.
That sums up te real problem with the new definition nicely. In a lot less than 75 years, we should have enough extra-solar objects well observed that we will have dozens of cases where there will be something that violates the new definition of planet.
We will have constant struggles during scientific debates over things that are huge, perhaps even Saturn sized or so, that aren't planets, if there is a single Mars sized object running in the leading or trailing Trojan/Lagrange point so they violate test three. Astronomers will be trying to present symposia on such subjects as possible signs of life on estra-solar planets, only to get mired in near endless arguements over just what to call those damned things instead of debating the actual evidence. Something roughly the mass of Jupiter will be discovered in orbit around Epsilon Indi, and will count as a dwarf planet by the new definition. The public will get more and more confused, and in the end will practically beg their politicians to cut any remaining funding.
Orcus? Like D&D? Hey, in 3.5 edition rules, he's trimmed down a lot. No more big round belly, he's buff, he's cut, he's glistening, he's a veritable Arnold S. of demon princes! (It would be a shame if this object was named for the classical reference). I'm gonna miss planet Santa, and its two moons, Rudolph and Olive. (And Xena and her two moons, left and right). You know, if we keept all those whacky new planets, it would be a death blow to astrology, right? Who could still take a pseudoscience seriously with names like these added?
Here's mine: The various new objects discovered in the 1990's were being named for mythological entites, and in what was perhaps an effort to be politically correct, these included examples such as Sedna, an Inuit goddess of the sea. Only after there were 'threats' by a younger group of Astronomers to name other such objects Xena, Santa, and such did the comittee start stripping Pluto of planetary status rather than adding more planets. So, it seems just as likely that the scientists involved were acting out of a purly emotional desire to avoid looking silly, or some misguided feeling that the purity of Astronomy was being sullied by those youg whipper-snappers.
Why should we believe the comittee actually used science and logic to make a decision, rather than just rationalizing their entirely emotional decision after they had already reached it? (Oh, but they're scientists, so they can't be subjective or emotional. We should blindly take their word they didn't have any pre-existing emotive stake in the decision because they themselves say so. We know politicians are emotional and irrational, and generally venial and corrupt, while all astronomers are as crisply logical as Mr. Spock. Those of us who don't have PhD's in Astronomy should shut up and let our new priesthood exercise it's superhuman perfect rationality.).
Personally, I don't have that much emotional stake in whether Pluto is a planet or not. I do however have a rather fundamental distaste for a comittee that argues they should automatically be presumed to be more rattional than any being that disagrees with them, including a lot of professional Astronomers with degrees and histories just as good as anyone who actually voted at that final meeting. That's doubtless emotional of me. I was taught that if you really have logic and reason on your side, you should also have confidence you can win the debate without waiting until the other side has mostly boarded their flights back home, before calling for a ballot.
Unless it's equally fair right now for people to ask you if you have some scientific, rather than emotional reasons for not calling Pluto a planet, the whole debate isn't fair. Either everyone's rationality can be questioned without particular evidence, or no one's should.
Why not accord Pluto special status as the first of the Kupier Belt objects discovered? After all, there are several cases where a new biological species was discovered, and it was also the first example of its whole genus. No one is now requiring taxonomists to go back and pick a new latin genus name that is more typical of other species in that genus, once more are found. Pluto's non-planet-hood rests on there being other approximately spherical objects of the same approximate size discovered well after it was. If those hadn't turned up, nearly no one would be rethinking Pluto's own classification. If Pluto can be stricken from the list of planets, then phylum Hemichordata can and should be folded into the Chordates, Class Crustacia into class Insecta (and subphylum hexapoidia eliminated), and kingdom Fungi into kingdom Animalia, all on the basis of intermediary or novel species discovered well after the broader structure was laid out.
While we are at it, the people who worked on devising a series of categories to classify all biological organisms are collectively called Methodists. The religious faction of the same name should immediately cease and decist using the term, and New Mexico should keep its nose out of what is, after all, a purely scientific issue.
Agreed, kidnapping is definitely way, Way, WAY above the level where an Article 15 is still an option. If either kidnapping or attempted murder charges seem appropriate, she will get either a 3 or a 5 person board, probably all higher ranking officers (There is an option for an enlisted person to have at least 1 NCO on the board at the defendant's request, but that shouldn't apply for a Captain, if the Navy court martial is anything like the Army or Air Force ones). At least, there's no possibility of the death penalty. I'd just about bet she'll eventually be court martialed, by a board consisting of two Navy Captains senior to her in date of rank, and chaired by a light Admiral. Maybe they'll squeeze a Commodore in there somewhere. (Does the Navy still have those?)
Note: I am not a military lawyer. I base this only on a former comissioned officer's general familiarity with the Uniform Code of Military Justice, as taught by the Army, not the Navy.
What's worse has been some companies gaming the system by writing those detailed requirements so they are literally impossible to fufill - i.e. "Must have 8 years experience writing Windows Vista specific apps for intel 16 core CPUs.". Apparently, no one from the government checks to see if the requirement is even remotely possible before authorizing H1B visas, nor do they check to see if the guest workers actually meet the stated requirements. This ought to trigger a full SEC audit every time it's reported, as the actual plans for developing new product lines are influential in valuing stock and require accurate reporting for publicly traded companies. Obviously impossible H1B qualification filings therefore should be taken as violations of Sarbanes-Oxley.
As for Bill, if he is willing to play on a field where the above starts being the case, I'd actually support a much broader H1B program - let's brain drain everyone else! The nation can prosper with lots of skilled immigrants entering the workforce. It can't prosper as a whole with some types of skilled Americans being expected to bear the cost for other groups mistakes, or to sustain their profitability.
I'm not holding my breath, since Microsoft has filed H1B visa LCA's for "Archetect" "Advertising Director", "Application Sales Specialist", "Builder", "Computational Linguist" and others during recent years of record. Guess America doesn't have enough of those. Disney's layoffs from the computer animation department during the Pixar struggle evidently didn't produce any suitable Microsoft candidates - Microsoft needed several H1Bs for "Animators" in 2003 and 4.
And how in the heck can there be a shortage of U.S. "Postdoc Researchers"? Then there's the 300+ visas requested for "Program Managers". What, we have an MBA shortage now? How about over 1000 requests for "Software Design Engineers" and "Software Test Engineers", are we really THAT short of U.S. citizens that can fill this demand?
Most remarkably, Microsoft sought H1Bs to recruit from several countries where English is an uncommon langauage, specifying English skills for 'Technical Writers' hired from them but not specifying skills in any other language - did they have to go overseas to recruit Technical Writers for English text? And why does any H1B request seek candidates with particular knowledges concerning U.S. law, the U.S. Tax code, or U.S. import regulations? Surely there are a lot more people in the US who know applicable U.S. law than there are overseas? In fact, If you can't recruit enough of those from U.S. sources, I'd think going overseas was a real long shot!
I realize there are other meanings to the word, but this interpretation is indeed valid.
There are always other definitions possible for any phrase, and there are some real idiots here on slashdot who will debate them endlessly. You've made a very good point with your definition. Making money at it, or aiming to make money, is just about always one of the legal definitions of being professional, and shows up in many related matters regularly. For example, the full US IRS test for something being a business rather than just a hobby involves whether the person took actions that were likely to increase his or her chances of making money, even if the buisness didn't actually show a profit.
Definitions of journalist that don't hinge on mass communication are mostly irrelevant to the law. Definitions of professional that don't consider money are generally irrelevant to a court proceeding. They may matter a lot at other times, but this article is about laws, not those other times.
So the real questions here are: How is France now defining the words 'professional' and 'journalist'? If these words, in French law, don't involve whether the person is attempting to communicate facts to large numbers of people, or whether they aim to get paid for doing so, what do they involve? And lastly, but most importantly for all non-French: How can we trust France to be either a reliable political partner or an economic one if they aren't using anything close to the long accepted legal definitions anymore?
That's not intended as a slap at the French. As a U.S. citizen, I'll freely admit my own country has been playing fast and loose with the legal definitions of some important words lately too.
There are definitely at lest one other self replicating molecule already known (RNA). RNA however has a much higner rate of copying errors, and lower error rates actually promote selection (down to a minimum - obviously zero errors means no selection at all, but even DNA is somewhere still well above the calculated ideal error rate for fastest selection).
This seems somewhat counter-intuitive, but if you think of a species as a set with somewhat fuzzy boundaries, more errors mean the boundaries are fuzzier. More members of a species deviate farther from the average type. Since enough members of a species usually survive long enough that the avaerage organism reproduces once, most members are already pretty well adapted to their niche. Higher mutation rates therefore mean more members are ill adapted, so selection actually slows down because more species get out of balance and die out faster and more often without leaving a successor species. A higher mutation rate also means more organisms have 2 or more mutations, and since most mutations are negative, a swamping effect occurs, where possibly good mutations don't ever get a chance to be selected. A really high mutation rate means genes don't just find themselves increasingly surrounded by defective partner genes, they actually get a chance of being overwritten before they linger for enough generations to be tested.
For sexually reproducing species, the chance of not being able to successfully breed with a given other goes up very quickly, etc, so sex becomes a less successful option than parthenogenesis, etc, and again selection slows down even more.
Most biologists think RNA was once dominant on our planet, and that there were other replicators, more primative and having higher error rates, before RNA. It's possible that some of these are more optimal under other conditions, i.e. more or less radiation, heat, or in other atmospheres. It's also possible some codes that were never developed here on Earth have developed in other places.
RICO is built largely on definitions involving physical force being used, rather than just financial pressure, so I doubt it could apply without undue stretching. RICO's been abused that way before (witness some of the drug related property seizures), but I really hope the government doesn't distort RICO further. As Robert E. Howard's character Bran Mak Morn put it (in Worms in the Earth) "There are weapons too foul to use even against Rome.".
However, there are other exceptions to the all settlements are final principle, and some of the best of them are from laws about the rights of minor children, cases where minorities have been selectively targeted for suit, and such. Since the **AAs have been sueing the parents of children aledged to have physically committed the tort, and since they probably are cherry picking targets based on low to moderate income (as a little statistical analysis seems to show), maybe something there will apply.
My point is still, simply, moot cases aren't precedent - as the RIAA loses a few and it becomes obvious that some, maybe a lot, of the people who settled could likely have won if they had stood up, someone will look for a way to replay the match. Maybe there isn't any legal way to go back - but even then, there's all the currently active cases the RIAA does in such conveniently sized batches, a thousand or so cases still open that could be greatly affected by a single precedent. The very worst case scenario for the RIAA may be highly unlikely, but some of the likelyer ones are pretty damned bad from the RIAA's viewpoint.
You're pretty close, but the 'trademarks' are actually closer to design patents on an exact image, that is a particular typeface, fitted in a rectangle of similar line weight (The X was originally fitted in a circle instead), and shown in either black on white or white on black. This doesn't keep anyone from doing either of two things - setting their ratings at the same ages as the MPAA's, or having the same number of them (or both). It doesn't keep them from using the same terminology, i.e. "For General audiences" or "Parential Guidance advised".
DC simply stopped using the comics code authority seal on some of its comics years before Marvel, with no problems, just as anyone could legally release a picture with no rating applied today (legally, but not practically, as most theatres would refuse to carry it, and it would be near impossible to find a distributer). Marvel supposedly made the mistake of using the exact paste up illos clipped from motion picture trailers for a time on cover art. It's apparently still legal to refer to a comic as being the equivalent of a PG or R rated film, both in review and in advertising, but I'm not sure how, for example a chart comparing rating systems would stand legally if the MPAA wanted to push the issue.
You're also right that XXX has no legal meaning. An X is normally presumed to mean 18 and up, and so NC-17 is sort of like the difference between PG and PG-13. The first NC-17 film was a biography of Henry Miller, and would have been hard to market with an X. It didn't really work well with the new rating either. I'd say NC-17 was an attempt to do a favor for a popular director, just like PG-13 was created to keep Steven Spielburg happy.
Right now, no MPAA studio would try to produce an X for financial reasons, but AFAIK it's not really gotten rid of. It's just that sexually charged pictures that aren't formula XXX don't stand a chance of making their costs back, and violent horror that exceeds R is marketable with no rating attached as home video, just so long as the theatre cut manages an R.
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It actually impacts a lot of theories, and definitely, just 'slashing some numbers' like a wal-mart price rollback is not all tht people should expect.
Fred Hoyle's work would be the most obvious. Hoyle was the first physicist to model nucleosynthesis in stars (1948).* His theory there still seems sound (or the math behind it does, and the US, the British, and the former Soviet Union all spent more money testing some of that math than on all other scientific research ever funded by those governments, put together), and one implication is that Oxygen and all the other heavier elements, were produced almost exclusively in stars, not in the big bang. The current age of the sun, and it's projected lifespan, are both based partly on putting the mis-measured amount of Oxygen into Hoyle's equations.
Hoyle is also known for having proposed a lot of rather odd theories later in his career, including some revised steady state theories, panspermia hypothisi, and so on. Some of those are based partly on his earlier math, and it's at least possible that this discovery will make some of the 'nutbar' Hoyle ideas less 'nutbar'. Hoyle's theories are even cited by some as real, solidly scientific proof of intelligent design. The impact there, whether it's real science or misinterpretation, would doubtless be phenominal, even (eu)catastropic.
* There's actually a number of others involved, people such as Fowler, Chandrasekhar, the Alpher/Bethe/Gamow gang, and still others - I'm simplfying a bit in giving Sir Fred all the credit.
Anyway, the sun may be less far along it's lifespan than we thought, possibly farther from the Helium Flash/red giant stage. (It still just about has to be about 5 billion years old, because independant geologic evidence suggests the earth is about 4.5 billion years old itself). So if the sun, and presumably related stars age more slowly than thought, then this possibly changes both supernova abundance and predicted spectrum and mass ratio numbers, and we have used those numbers to estimate the distance to distant galaxies, and the overall size and age of the universe.
It's even quite possible that this change in Oxygen numbers means our estimates of the mass of the universe, it's age, and so on are all skewed, and super-novae may happen less frequently so that will also reduce our accuracy of measurement and mean it will take us longer to get enough new data to check the new predictions to the same accuracy as the ones we now doubt. Thus, this news not only predicts we may have to revise a lot of figures, but that it will be a bit harder to do it right than it appeared the first time.
All the 'new physics bits', i.e. 'dark matter', 'dark energy', etc. all need refigured if the age and mass of the universe get refigured significantly. Some of them may be superfluous. Some new ideas may be needed. Yes, this could just possibly be that big (although it may well be much less significant in the end).
The government will just have to test every child and see which ones should be allowed authorial liscences. Then we will finally be safe.
I'd like to ask why someone always trots out some definition of "stealing", "theft", or similar words in these arguments, that isn't a legal definition. Right now, this is a matter of law. It will end up being settled by lawyers and courts, using the legal definitions of words like theft only. These other definitions don't matter.
Do any of the people offering these other definitions plan to challenge the court, by filing suit before a higher court to get the decisions to follow their offered definition? Are they petitioning their representitives to make their definitions law of the land? No? Then they don't really mean their own rhetoric.
The RIAA and MPAA individual members have all, without one single exception, lost at least one suit, filed by an artist or multiple artists, where the corporations were caught concealing the true status of profits, under-reporting gross or net take, and/or over-reporting expenses, billing for expenses not actually incurred, double, triple, and even quadruple billing. In several of these cases they have committed such large numbers of 'convenient mistakes all just happening to fall their way' that the judges deciding those cases have freely used terms such as "egregious", "willful" and even "rising to a level that is undoubtedly criminal" in their decisions. Last I heard how the law is supposed to work, contract fraud is supposed to be illegal, even with no armed force involved.
Yes, you could possibly justify an anti-trust argument, but how about this broader one. If artists are still entering into contracts with a group of companies that have all been caught cheating on contracts, there must be some unfair advantage to keep them doing it. Whether it's a monopolistic trust that leaves them no better options, or the group otherwise enjoys selective immunity from paying the full price of their contract violations is irrelevant. The government could vigorously prosecute where conduct crosses the line to criminal accounting practices, lieing under oath, and so on, and this would help a great deal whether there is a proven monopoly or not.
Sure, some of it, at least a little, can be blamed on various artist's stupidity. Put a clause in your recording contract that says there will be bowls of all green M&Ms available at all times on the soundstage, and you can expect to pay very dearly for it. Fair enough, but not nearly all the artists are that stupid. Which seems more likely, that there are so many artists too stupid to realize the risks, or that many of them do know they are going to get screwed, but feel like all better alternatives are closed off to them, and hope to be the one who isn't screwed too badly.
Prior post amounts to saying "show me a successful white collar criminal who turned to blue collar methods when they didn't have to, or agree I'm right!" I'm rather surprised you're rebutting only one part of it and letting the rest stand.
I see your first point, but how in the hell did you get the idea that a CEO could be "never directly responsible"? That's a marvelously narrow definition of the word directly, it stands utterly opposed to the way that phrase is used in all the body of both corporate law and US criminal law, and if it's your real logical position, then you should be equally opposed to holding the getaway car driver responsible for a homicide resulting from a bank robbery, since he too is not directly responsible. Are you sure you want to fling around terms such as "batshit insane"?
The problem I have with this is that classical music does get public subsidies, and those pay, at the very least, for the musicians to practice, train, and acquire reputations that make the sales of their reproduced music possible. In many cases, the subsidies buy recording gear, pay the light and heat bills for the halls during the recording process, and otherwise figure more directly into actually producing CDs. We* are funding parts of the production process.
*(meaning everyone, in the US, who lives in a local venue where classical music ticket sales are not subject to the entertainment tax but it is applied to other musical performances tickets, or those where it recieves a share of the local taxes as a subsidy, or where it gets federal grants - those there conditions together describe almost all classical performers, with a few possible exceptions such as the NBC orchestra).
There are supposed to be checks and balances, just as there are for government subsidized public TV programming. What we've seen there though, is the government does a favor for a friend in the industry. Even if taxes pay to develop a show such as Sesame Street or Barney, when the government auctions off merchandising rights and such, they go for absurdly low sums to insiders who make most of the money, instead of a deal where the taxpayers actually stand a chance of getting their investment back. While some local and state governments have been a bit more responsible with classical music, there are definite insider deals there as well.
So, as you put it, it's not so bad. It could be more equitable, more efficient, and generally better though.
I think having the anon. option is sensible. However, the coward descriptor needs to be taken at least partly as humor. I'm willing to stand behind my posts if anyone wants to bother to link my real name to my net-o-nym, but let's face it, only a fool never changes an opinion, and only a bigger fool judges someone solely by a post they may have made as a much younger or less informed person. The problem is, we have people running companies or engaging in politics, who are just such fools. Who wants to be judged by someone who is a. an unidentified lurker, b. not openly engaging in the discussion or revealing any of their own opinions, c. giving the poster no chance to clarify or revise their remarks and d. willing to treat a single phrase from a single post made years ago as the only evidence to be allowed in that judgement.
I certainly hope posters (including you) will show the courage of their convictions somewhere, but it's not fair to assume cowardice, any more than it would be to say anyone who won't stand on a soapbox in a public park before a crowd obviously filled with drunken hecklers, just to make his opinions known is a coward. Sometimes you just think another venue may be more productive, or want to debate on the peaks instead of in the valleys.
Exactly!
To all you peple who have been argueing that copyright violation is theft, and saying all those 'clever' things about how the people who oppose the RIAA really merely want to steal copies, etc. - By your own logic, the RIAA is now obviously and openly a criminal organization, that wants to commit FRAUD with impunity, and so ALL of you who support it are also Liars, Cheats, Con-artists, Carney Shills, and most of all, FELONS. No-good, Criminal, Scum! You cons all deserve the chair, if we can figure out how to get your high horses in there under you.
Let's call it waht it IS! Let's call ALL the criminals what they ARE!
Would you consider trading it for a nice bridge in New York city?
If there is any Irony, it's not so much the porn industry's actions, but the anti-piracy fight from the rest of the industry. The RIAA and MPAA started pushing terms like theft and piracy to influence the mainstream consumers, and a lot of their advertizing is aimed at 'wholesome family values' types. (Like the movie adds that say "You wouldn't steal a purse..." - last time I saw it, I looked around the theatre and realized a couple of the people in there probably paid for the ticket that way). What's ironic is that this puts middle america on the side of protecting all industral IP, including porn. It's like the drug laws - Individual dope dealers may not like the drug laws, but organized crime has figured out how to exploit the existing drug laws so well that they actually like them, and so supporting the existing situation puts 'the forces of goodness and niceness' on the same side as the Mob.
The Clinton Era assault weapons ban doesn't ban assault weapons. Instead it bans some weapons that look like assault weapons. (I'm assuming both you and the original poster are writing about the Violent Crime Control and law Enforcement Act of 1994, and not the "Brady" act, which, from a weapon standpoint, was only about handguns).
While there are parts of the law that actually focus in part or even mostly on the potential of a weapon to kill large numbers, i.e. magazine capacity restrictions, the law also affects integral flash supressors and weapons designed to fit one, folding stocks, bipod mounts, and barrel shrouds (a device whose sole purpose is to prevent people from getting burned by a hot barrel). None of those things has much, if any, relation to the weapon's criminal use potential. You could argue that a flash supressor makes it harder for a police sniper to spot a well concealed assault weapon wielder, for example, but that's a real stretch. By the very same 'logic' congress used in debate, the government could have 'justified' banning weapons that don't sufficiently often blow up in the user's face! (After all, there would be fewer 'successful' Columbine imitations if there was a 1 in 4 chance of the shooter himself dieing every time he pulled the trigger).
I don't know if I would call the ban an evil act, but it's at the least a pretty incompetent piece of legislation.
YRO is overused as a class, but there is something to rights arguements about trained dogs, etc. that whole pesky "Unreasonable Search and Seizure" clause in the U. S. Constitution implies that some searches are more reasonable than others. Dogs provide an extension of search capabilities. So do X-Ray scans, cavity searches, DNA tests, retasking military grade spy sats to look for pot plantations, or compulsory urine testing. Dogs at customs are generally considered a reasonable search tool for the kinds of things customs has to detect.
BUT, customs is generally charged with detecting some very odd things, such as livestock or pets that are not normally illegal to own, but are illegal to import, and with detecting drugs. Checking for bootleg CDs has certain implications that can't be avoided in this context. First, the society is assuming that catching this particular form of copyright violation is roughly on a par with catching heroin smuggling. That's pretty damned strongly implied if we put similar amounts of money into training dogs for both (and if anything, it's cheaper to train a dog to detect several related opiates and other drugs than it is one plasticiser*). Second, discovering CDs proves nothing, unless the humans associated with the dogs can make a proper determination that the CDs aren't legal ones. That implies we (as a society) are devoting resources to training the human customs agents in telling bootleg CDs from legitimate ones, AT A TIME WHEN WE HAVE SERIOUS DOUBTS ABOUT THEIR TRAINING IN DETECTING INCOMING TERRORISTS WITH WMDS!
* I've actually helped local law enforcement train drug and explosive sniffing dogs. It's difficult fun to try and outwit a well trained sniffer dog, and I have no doubts at all they can be trained to accurately find polycarbonate plasticizers, but I really, seriously doubt it's as easy as training them for much more aromatic explosive nitrate compounds, and that is weeks or months of work. Typical training involves taking the dogs to an unfamiliar location, which means setting aside a national guard armory, old courthouse or other state owned building, often for several days, and having about 20 people previously unknown to the dogs available to plant the 'evidence'. You can't use just one or two people over and over or the dog starts using their scent markers to shortcut training. Instead you have to have several people take turns, hand off packages to each other, and otherwise mix things up so the dog trains properly on the chemical desired. That can be 20 people on a payroll all day even if they are going to actually do only 15 minutes work each, and this is far from cheap.
First, the IAU doesn't want to call Xena, Saedna, et. al. asteroids at all. Rather they proposed the term "minor planet". There are no longer any rules for naming asteroids, because the term 'asteroids' itself is now considered a layman's term. There are thus absolutely no official understandings about naming "asteroids". There certainly were some back when the term itself was acceptable, but they were not what you apparently think they were. Certainly, the IAU didn't decide to drop the term asteroids, and then replace the old rules for naming them with an informal understanding - they made more rules, not fewer.
According to the current rules (re. minor planets) of the International Astronomical Union, political and military names may not be used until a century after the event or the death of the person in question. Nor may names be obscene, in bad taste, too similar to any existing name, or more than 16 letters long.
The 'too similar' clause above means the IAU can't officially support the proposed renaming of Xena to Eris, by the way - it's too similar to Eros. So right now, a department of the IAU has shot down the very name the body of the whole tried to make official after officially clarifying that Xena was always unofficial just in case anyone said differently. As it stands, Eris is the official unofficial name (unofficially), Xena is the unofficial official name (but that's at least official), and you're technically argueing that what's unofficially official is more unofficial than what's officially unofficial. (Granted, you may be right).
It is also considered bad form for discoverers to name minor planets after themselves or their pets. There is a 10 year moratorium after discovery on anyone else besides the discoverer naming aminor planet, so only Eris' discover can suggest an alternative for another 5 years or so if Eris is rejected. Taking these rules into account, the relevant committee of the IAU (of which there are several) decides on the name. If they had just counted it as a damned planet, they could automatically rename it if they don't accept Eris, but now their own rules mean an official rejection puts the ball back in the discoverer's court.
There are some older traditions which apparently still apply to what used to be asteroids in special types of orbits. For example, ones which come inside the orbit of the Earth are still usually named for characters from Greek mythology; examples include (1862) Apollo, (2101) Adonis, (4341) Poseidon and (5731) Zeus. A subset of these objects are those which actually have orbits smaller than that of the Earth; these are usually given names out of Egyptian mythology, for example, (2062) Aten and (3554) Amun. Minor planets which come near to, but don't cross, the Earth's orbit are often given names out of Aztez or Inca mythology, for example, (1915) Quetzalcoatl and (1980) Tezcatlipoca.
Several minor planets have been discovered which lead or trail the planet Jupiter in gravitationally stable points ("Lagrangian" points). These were collectively named the "Trojan" asteroids and were always named after figures from the Trojan War; examples include (588) Achilles, (911) Agamemnon, and (1143) Odysseus. This may be still a rule, or may indeed be just a tradition. The IAU is officially unofficial about that too.
Then their's minor planet 3415 - Kilopi.
Certainly - tangleing with the Nazgul is just plain dumb if you are not mighty among the first born. (I won't go into why IBM's legal dept. is sometimes called the Nazgul here, but that metaphor's been around for decades). Darl should have looked into a mirror, and in his best Dirty Harry imitation voice, asked himself "Are you a 3,000 year old elflord who's feeling lucky? Well, are you, punk?", before ever considering suing IBM.
I appreciate being modded funny above, but I meant it in a half-serious way. If SCO is facing trouble with the IRS, it will come as a spin-off result of a prior SEC investigation, so we, the general public, will not hear one single solitary word about it until at least a few weeks after the SEC announces something. If it's going on right now, we may know in a year or so.
That sums up te real problem with the new definition nicely. In a lot less than 75 years, we should have enough extra-solar objects well observed that we will have dozens of cases where there will be something that violates the new definition of planet.
We will have constant struggles during scientific debates over things that are huge, perhaps even Saturn sized or so, that aren't planets, if there is a single Mars sized object running in the leading or trailing Trojan/Lagrange point so they violate test three. Astronomers will be trying to present symposia on such subjects as possible signs of life on estra-solar planets, only to get mired in near endless arguements over just what to call those damned things instead of debating the actual evidence. Something roughly the mass of Jupiter will be discovered in orbit around Epsilon Indi, and will count as a dwarf planet by the new definition. The public will get more and more confused, and in the end will practically beg their politicians to cut any remaining funding.
Orcus? Like D&D? Hey, in 3.5 edition rules, he's trimmed down a lot. No more big round belly, he's buff, he's cut, he's glistening, he's a veritable Arnold S. of demon princes! (It would be a shame if this object was named for the classical reference).
I'm gonna miss planet Santa, and its two moons, Rudolph and Olive. (And Xena and her two moons, left and right).
You know, if we keept all those whacky new planets, it would be a death blow to astrology, right? Who could still take a pseudoscience seriously with names like these added?
Here's mine:
The various new objects discovered in the 1990's were being named for mythological entites, and in what was perhaps an effort to be politically correct, these included examples such as Sedna, an Inuit goddess of the sea. Only after there were 'threats' by a younger group of Astronomers to name other such objects Xena, Santa, and such did the comittee start stripping Pluto of planetary status rather than adding more planets. So, it seems just as likely that the scientists involved were acting out of a purly emotional desire to avoid looking silly, or some misguided feeling that the purity of Astronomy was being sullied by those youg whipper-snappers.
Why should we believe the comittee actually used science and logic to make a decision, rather than just rationalizing their entirely emotional decision after they had already reached it? (Oh, but they're scientists, so they can't be subjective or emotional. We should blindly take their word they didn't have any pre-existing emotive stake in the decision because they themselves say so. We know politicians are emotional and irrational, and generally venial and corrupt, while all astronomers are as crisply logical as Mr. Spock. Those of us who don't have PhD's in Astronomy should shut up and let our new priesthood exercise it's superhuman perfect rationality.).
Personally, I don't have that much emotional stake in whether Pluto is a planet or not. I do however have a rather fundamental distaste for a comittee that argues they should automatically be presumed to be more rattional than any being that disagrees with them, including a lot of professional Astronomers with degrees and histories just as good as anyone who actually voted at that final meeting. That's doubtless emotional of me. I was taught that if you really have logic and reason on your side, you should also have confidence you can win the debate without waiting until the other side has mostly boarded their flights back home, before calling for a ballot.
Unless it's equally fair right now for people to ask you if you have some scientific, rather than emotional reasons for not calling Pluto a planet, the whole debate isn't fair. Either everyone's rationality can be questioned without particular evidence, or no one's should.
Why not accord Pluto special status as the first of the Kupier Belt objects discovered? After all, there are several cases where a new biological species was discovered, and it was also the first example of its whole genus. No one is now requiring taxonomists to go back and pick a new latin genus name that is more typical of other species in that genus, once more are found. Pluto's non-planet-hood rests on there being other approximately spherical objects of the same approximate size discovered well after it was. If those hadn't turned up, nearly no one would be rethinking Pluto's own classification. If Pluto can be stricken from the list of planets, then phylum Hemichordata can and should be folded into the Chordates, Class Crustacia into class Insecta (and subphylum hexapoidia eliminated), and kingdom Fungi into kingdom Animalia, all on the basis of intermediary or novel species discovered well after the broader structure was laid out.
While we are at it, the people who worked on devising a series of categories to classify all biological organisms are collectively called Methodists. The religious faction of the same name should immediately cease and decist using the term, and New Mexico should keep its nose out of what is, after all, a purely scientific issue.
SCO would have been better off tangling with the IRS.
Uhm, what makes you think they haven't?
Agreed, kidnapping is definitely way, Way, WAY above the level where an Article 15 is still an option. If either kidnapping or attempted murder charges seem appropriate, she will get either a 3 or a 5 person board, probably all higher ranking officers (There is an option for an enlisted person to have at least 1 NCO on the board at the defendant's request, but that shouldn't apply for a Captain, if the Navy court martial is anything like the Army or Air Force ones). At least, there's no possibility of the death penalty. I'd just about bet she'll eventually be court martialed, by a board consisting of two Navy Captains senior to her in date of rank, and chaired by a light Admiral. Maybe they'll squeeze a Commodore in there somewhere. (Does the Navy still have those?)
Note: I am not a military lawyer. I base this only on a former comissioned officer's general familiarity with the Uniform Code of Military Justice, as taught by the Army, not the Navy.
What's worse has been some companies gaming the system by writing those detailed requirements so they are literally impossible to fufill - i.e. "Must have 8 years experience writing Windows Vista specific apps for intel 16 core CPUs.". Apparently, no one from the government checks to see if the requirement is even remotely possible before authorizing H1B visas, nor do they check to see if the guest workers actually meet the stated requirements. This ought to trigger a full SEC audit every time it's reported, as the actual plans for developing new product lines are influential in valuing stock and require accurate reporting for publicly traded companies. Obviously impossible H1B qualification filings therefore should be taken as violations of Sarbanes-Oxley.
As for Bill, if he is willing to play on a field where the above starts being the case, I'd actually support a much broader H1B program - let's brain drain everyone else! The nation can prosper with lots of skilled immigrants entering the workforce. It can't prosper as a whole with some types of skilled Americans being expected to bear the cost for other groups mistakes, or to sustain their profitability.
I'm not holding my breath, since Microsoft has filed H1B visa LCA's for "Archetect" "Advertising Director", "Application Sales Specialist", "Builder", "Computational Linguist" and others during recent years of record. Guess America doesn't have enough of those. Disney's layoffs from the computer animation department during the Pixar struggle evidently didn't produce any suitable Microsoft candidates - Microsoft needed several H1Bs for "Animators" in 2003 and 4.
And how in the heck can there be a shortage of U.S. "Postdoc Researchers"? Then there's the 300+ visas requested for "Program Managers". What, we have an MBA shortage now? How about over 1000 requests for "Software Design Engineers" and "Software Test Engineers", are we really THAT short of U.S. citizens that can fill this demand?
Most remarkably, Microsoft sought H1Bs to recruit from several countries where English is an uncommon langauage, specifying English skills for 'Technical Writers' hired from them but not specifying skills in any other language - did they have to go overseas to recruit Technical Writers for English text? And why does any H1B request seek candidates with particular knowledges concerning U.S. law, the U.S. Tax code, or U.S. import regulations? Surely there are a lot more people in the US who know applicable U.S. law than there are overseas? In fact, If you can't recruit enough of those from U.S. sources, I'd think going overseas was a real long shot!
I realize there are other meanings to the word, but this interpretation is indeed valid.
There are always other definitions possible for any phrase, and there are some real idiots here on slashdot who will debate them endlessly. You've made a very good point with your definition. Making money at it, or aiming to make money, is just about always one of the legal definitions of being professional, and shows up in many related matters regularly. For example, the full US IRS test for something being a business rather than just a hobby involves whether the person took actions that were likely to increase his or her chances of making money, even if the buisness didn't actually show a profit.
Definitions of journalist that don't hinge on mass communication are mostly irrelevant to the law. Definitions of professional that don't consider money are generally irrelevant to a court proceeding. They may matter a lot at other times, but this article is about laws, not those other times.
So the real questions here are: How is France now defining the words 'professional' and 'journalist'? If these words, in French law, don't involve whether the person is attempting to communicate facts to large numbers of people, or whether they aim to get paid for doing so, what do they involve? And lastly, but most importantly for all non-French: How can we trust France to be either a reliable political partner or an economic one if they aren't using anything close to the long accepted legal definitions anymore?
That's not intended as a slap at the French. As a U.S. citizen, I'll freely admit my own country has been playing fast and loose with the legal definitions of some important words lately too.
There are definitely at lest one other self replicating molecule already known (RNA). RNA however has a much higner rate of copying errors, and lower error rates actually promote selection (down to a minimum - obviously zero errors means no selection at all, but even DNA is somewhere still well above the calculated ideal error rate for fastest selection).
This seems somewhat counter-intuitive, but if you think of a species as a set with somewhat fuzzy boundaries, more errors mean the boundaries are fuzzier. More members of a species deviate farther from the average type. Since enough members of a species usually survive long enough that the avaerage organism reproduces once, most members are already pretty well adapted to their niche. Higher mutation rates therefore mean more members are ill adapted, so selection actually slows down because more species get out of balance and die out faster and more often without leaving a successor species. A higher mutation rate also means more organisms have 2 or more mutations, and since most mutations are negative, a swamping effect occurs, where possibly good mutations don't ever get a chance to be selected. A really high mutation rate means genes don't just find themselves increasingly surrounded by defective partner genes, they actually get a chance of being overwritten before they linger for enough generations to be tested.
For sexually reproducing species, the chance of not being able to successfully breed with a given other goes up very quickly, etc, so sex becomes a less successful option than parthenogenesis, etc, and again selection slows down even more.
Most biologists think RNA was once dominant on our planet, and that there were other replicators, more primative and having higher error rates, before RNA. It's possible that some of these are more optimal under other conditions, i.e. more or less radiation, heat, or in other atmospheres. It's also possible some codes that were never developed here on Earth have developed in other places.
RICO is built largely on definitions involving physical force being used, rather than just financial pressure, so I doubt it could apply without undue stretching. RICO's been abused that way before (witness some of the drug related property seizures), but I really hope the government doesn't distort RICO further. As Robert E. Howard's character Bran Mak Morn put it (in Worms in the Earth) "There are weapons too foul to use even against Rome.".
However, there are other exceptions to the all settlements are final principle, and some of the best of them are from laws about the rights of minor children, cases where minorities have been selectively targeted for suit, and such. Since the **AAs have been sueing the parents of children aledged to have physically committed the tort, and since they probably are cherry picking targets based on low to moderate income (as a little statistical analysis seems to show), maybe something there will apply.
My point is still, simply, moot cases aren't precedent - as the RIAA loses a few and it becomes obvious that some, maybe a lot, of the people who settled could likely have won if they had stood up, someone will look for a way to replay the match. Maybe there isn't any legal way to go back - but even then, there's all the currently active cases the RIAA does in such conveniently sized batches, a thousand or so cases still open that could be greatly affected by a single precedent. The very worst case scenario for the RIAA may be highly unlikely, but some of the likelyer ones are pretty damned bad from the RIAA's viewpoint.
You're pretty close, but the 'trademarks' are actually closer to design patents on an exact image, that is a particular typeface, fitted in a rectangle of similar line weight (The X was originally fitted in a circle instead), and shown in either black on white or white on black. This doesn't keep anyone from doing either of two things - setting their ratings at the same ages as the MPAA's, or having the same number of them (or both). It doesn't keep them from using the same terminology, i.e. "For General audiences" or "Parential Guidance advised".
DC simply stopped using the comics code authority seal on some of its comics years before Marvel, with no problems, just as anyone could legally release a picture with no rating applied today (legally, but not practically, as most theatres would refuse to carry it, and it would be near impossible to find a distributer). Marvel supposedly made the mistake of using the exact paste up illos clipped from motion picture trailers for a time on cover art. It's apparently still legal to refer to a comic as being the equivalent of a PG or R rated film, both in review and in advertising, but I'm not sure how, for example a chart comparing rating systems would stand legally if the MPAA wanted to push the issue.
You're also right that XXX has no legal meaning. An X is normally presumed to mean 18 and up, and so NC-17 is sort of like the difference between PG and PG-13. The first NC-17 film was a biography of Henry Miller, and would have been hard to market with an X. It didn't really work well with the new rating either. I'd say NC-17 was an attempt to do a favor for a popular director, just like PG-13 was created to keep Steven Spielburg happy.
Right now, no MPAA studio would try to produce an X for financial reasons, but AFAIK it's not really gotten rid of. It's just that sexually charged pictures that aren't formula XXX don't stand a chance of making their costs back, and violent horror that exceeds R is marketable with no rating attached as home video, just so long as the theatre cut manages an R.