Yes, we switched to Linux. All of us. We can tell because all Germans share a hive mind. That's also why we all use the same bank account (plus 20,999,999 business accounts).
Actually, not all merchants offer this and I'd only give an Einzugsermächtigung (direct debit authorization) to a company I trust to not abuse it, like one of the big tradidtional mail-order companies. I know I can issue chargebacks but still.
The default mode of operations for smaller mail-order/online-order companies is advance payment through wire transfer (or sometimes PayPal) or payment-on-delivery. Advance payment is what I usually use; it doesn't grant random companies access to my account and doesn't cost me any money, unlike payment-on-delivery.
I have a credit card but that is only for international orders where a CC works better than the alternatives.
I know nobody who uses checks anymore. That's what wire transfers are for. In theory you can order checks from your bank but, well... I haven't seen a real checkbook in at least a decade.
It might actually. Who knows where the drug rings invest their money. Of course this only applies if criminal organizations and not the state are seling the stuff.
Even the terrorist card works for pro-legalization. I mean, the terrorist card, one of the most vacuous arguments possible. Next we'll find a pro-weed verse in the Bible or something...
Drugs are illegal and thus unregulated. Only criminals sell them and they aren't interested in protecting people from themselves. Children can buy drugs and indeed ar encouraged to do so by the dealers. The result: Lots of people get addicted at a young age.
Drugs are legal. Laws can be enacted that limit access to them - for example only to people age 21 and up. The dealers are out a job as getting the stuff into the legal stores is much cheaper than smuggling it into the country. The result: Way less minors get access to drugs.
Also, with drugs legalized people would be much less hesistant to enter rehab, which would further mitigate the problems.
Fact is that drug prohibition actually reduces the hoops people have to jump through. I don't have to present my ID card/driver's license at a store, I just have to ask around for a dealer. And since dealers are always interested in acquiring new customers I am surely able to find on in a few days at most. Also, illegal stuff is exciting (at least to teenagers who want to feel like they can change society by rebelling against it) so demand is created by the very laws designed to reduce it.
(Of course teenagers will still find drugs interesting if they are merely age-restricted but it's going to be mre difficult for them to obtain them. Currently they just have to ask that guy who always hang sout near the schoolyard.)
B
Banning something and hoping it just somehow goes away is like pretending your OS won't be trashed if you make/usr read-only and ignore the scratching sounds coming from your hard drive.
It's not a Godwin if you don't compare anyone to Hitler or the Nazis so I will make one point using them: The Nazis showed how malleable society's standards and morals are. Feed someone, give them work and offer them easy solutions to difficult problems and they will believe anything you say. Do that with enough people and society's morals will change to whatever you want them to be.
The laws should reflect society's standards and morals but they should also attempt to moderate, especially if society wants things that aren't quite compatible with things like the declaration of human rights.
The problem with alcohol prohibition is the same as with drug prohibition: It simplay doesn't work. In fact, I posit that it aggravates the problem - the supply is still there but controlled by organized crime, demand is high and quality goes way down. Don't expect people to stop drinking just because the state says so. They'd rather pay Uncle Al a hundred bucks for a bottle of Mexican it's-almost-like-whisky, which is even potable if you add water.
Prohibition mean that the state oses all control over the substance. It becomes more expensive but peope circumvent that by paying more. However, none of that money goes to the state and all of it goes to the smuggler ring that organized the goods. There are no quality controls either (as well as no care for quality), so alcohol becomes even more unhealthy. Also, the only thing keeping children from procuring booze is the honesty of the man selling it... who is a criminal interested in getting the stuff off his hands.
Additionally, alcohol would become an entry drug for hard stuff like heroin - after all it's sold by the same people who are very interested in upselling their customers on the "premium stuff". As others have pointed out, meth is pretty cheap so it might end up complementing booze when supplies are low.
Alcohol prohibition is an exceedingly bad idea. You can't keep people from doing something they really want. Regulation offers a good way of mediating alcohol access - the state (and not criminals) makes money, quality is high, minors can't easily buy booze... that's pretty good already.
Now imagine hemp worked like that. Only quality hemp without any funky additives, minors can't buy it, the state can tax and regulate it, drug traffickers lose money because they can't price-match the legal stuff and already-existing alcohol abuse legislation (with some tweaks) could be applied to protect people from themselves.
It's always better to accept that bad things exist and work with them instead of putting your head in the sand and hoping they just disappear. Prohibition is the latter.
Before someone points out that an LLC is very similar to a GmbH: Yes, I should have used something like Kommanditgesellschaft instead. I only noticed the blunder after posting.
For the same reason you can't register a company in the United States as a Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung: There is no such thing in our law. We have the similar concept of Gemeinfreiheit but German copyright is mandatory: You create a work, it's protected. Gemeinfreiheit reduces the protection but only applies to certain government resources.
A free licence is the best thing you can do in Germany - except for waiting for the work's copyright to run out, which may well take centuries if the terms keep getting extended. Since even the WW2 pictures are not old enough to lose copyright protection CC really was one of the best options they had.
But "unrestricted use" was not the question. The question was "is this under a Wikimedia Commons-accepted free license or public domain". They didn't delete the picture because they couldn't use it, they deleted it because it collided with their rulebook. This was not a case of overbearing copyright law, it was simply a case of beaureaucracy.
They're making a cast of his face, probably for some "racial hygiene" reason. The original caption in the archive speculates that the man might be a Sinti or Roma, which would explain why they're so interested in his face.
Strict gun laws can work but only if they were strict from the beginning. Germany had relatively strict gun laws ever since its inception (sixty years ago) and we do have fewer cases of guns used in crimes. It's hard to get a gun legally, which also means it's hard to get a gun illegally (as there aren't many illegal imports as weapon trafficking is difficult and dangerous and the German market consists of people used to not using guns).
Now compare that to the USA. There are lots of guns around and it's easy to obtain one. If strict gun laws would be imposed on everyone, the criminals still had a vast ocean of guns they can secure for themselves before the new laws go live. Thus, harsher gun laws don't do much to help leople agaist violent criminals.
Gun control can keep new guns from entering the system but it's bad at removing existing ones from it. Thus it makes much mre sense when used in a country where there are few privately owned guns to begin with.
Well, its sort of the nature of the game: in order to keep up demand for new sets, they have to keep overpowering them. Which is super lame for guys like me who still have cards from arabian nights.:(
I quote from the flavor text of the Booster Tutor card: Real men use Arabian Nights boosters.
By the way, the Un-sets (Unglued and Unhinged) are surprisingly useful in spicing up old decks. Of course you get a lot of chaff and technically the Un-sets aren't legal, well, just about everywhere. But it's not like Rocket Powered Turbo Slug or Goblin S.W.A.T. Team are particularly overpowered...
For some reason it's having some kind of a renaissance among my friends, with some just picking it up for the first time. As someone who plays using mostly his old Fifth Edition cards I'm pretty frustrated - pretty much everything from about Eigth Edition onwards is seriously overpowered, with the latest set, Shards of Alara, being the worst; it contains gems like this one.
If you're thinking of picking up Magic again I advise either getting a Tenth Edition* deck (so you won't be comletely outgunned) and never plaing against someone with an Elf dack (those can produce infinite Mana) or only playing against people who stick to the older editions. Or getting something like Magic Workstation, a nifty (if somewhat buggy) program that allows you to build decks and play Magic online. The trial verison isn't too limited, just a nag screen and limited solitaire play.
A note to the mods: Before you mod this -1, Offtopic remember that this is more nerdy than most of the news you see on this site nowadays so it deserves a little credit for that.;)
* Mirrodin/Darksteel/Fifth Dawn work, too. If you're into artifact decks these contain all you need to build an indestructible army that doesn't require any mana to play. Which is about on par with the rest of the newer sets.
She contributed to someone's death, the fact that she did it over the internet is irrelevant.
But (if I read TFA correctly) she was acquitted from contributing to someone's death; the federal crime she's getting nailed with is entirely about doing things on the internet.
Very true. JAG Attorney (a 3/3 white Soldier creature card) only has "[Tap]: Prevent any damage from any one source dealt to target Soldier this turn." and the damage has already occurred several turns ago so tapping it won't help the OP. Since we don't want to deflect but rather deal damage, the correct procedure would of course be to declare the JAG Attorney as an attacker.
I already said it: Most sane people are not going to install some random driver I give them and then reboot their system just so they can mount whatever filesystem I'm using. Keeping Windows fast and stable is enough work without adding random IFSes and all *nix users I know reboot about once a month tops so losing their open applications to install a kernel module is a major inconvenience to them.
Would you install some random kernel-level software and reboot just because someone wants to plug their USB drive into your computer? I certainly wouldn't. And it doesn't matter that the guy who wrote the driver proclaims on his website that "during my private testing I have found it to be 100% reliable"; random third-party drivers are not something one usually associates with a stable system.
It has to be official native support. Everything else will keep access to your data restricted to a subset of all machines.
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He must be new here.
We're talking about nonphotonic light, of course.
Yes, we switched to Linux. All of us. We can tell because all Germans share a hive mind. That's also why we all use the same bank account (plus 20,999,999 business accounts).
Actually, not all merchants offer this and I'd only give an Einzugsermächtigung (direct debit authorization) to a company I trust to not abuse it, like one of the big tradidtional mail-order companies. I know I can issue chargebacks but still.
The default mode of operations for smaller mail-order/online-order companies is advance payment through wire transfer (or sometimes PayPal) or payment-on-delivery. Advance payment is what I usually use; it doesn't grant random companies access to my account and doesn't cost me any money, unlike payment-on-delivery.
I have a credit card but that is only for international orders where a CC works better than the alternatives.
I know nobody who uses checks anymore. That's what wire transfers are for. In theory you can order checks from your bank but, well... I haven't seen a real checkbook in at least a decade.
You mean there's less than 500 Euros in those 21 million accounts?
After bathing in PCB he most likely won't. ;)
Well, some of the boys that are born as girls might end up as geeks so the geek world might at least see an influx of "close enough".
On the behalf of my fellow males I'd like to say:
...wait a minute, that dress is for sale? brb
It might actually. Who knows where the drug rings invest their money. Of course this only applies if criminal organizations and not the state are seling the stuff.
Even the terrorist card works for pro-legalization. I mean, the terrorist card, one of the most vacuous arguments possible. Next we'll find a pro-weed verse in the Bible or something...
Let's compare:
/usr read-only and ignore the scratching sounds coming from your hard drive.
Drugs are illegal and thus unregulated. Only criminals sell them and they aren't interested in protecting people from themselves. Children can buy drugs and indeed ar encouraged to do so by the dealers. The result: Lots of people get addicted at a young age.
Drugs are legal. Laws can be enacted that limit access to them - for example only to people age 21 and up. The dealers are out a job as getting the stuff into the legal stores is much cheaper than smuggling it into the country. The result: Way less minors get access to drugs.
Also, with drugs legalized people would be much less hesistant to enter rehab, which would further mitigate the problems.
Fact is that drug prohibition actually reduces the hoops people have to jump through. I don't have to present my ID card/driver's license at a store, I just have to ask around for a dealer. And since dealers are always interested in acquiring new customers I am surely able to find on in a few days at most. Also, illegal stuff is exciting (at least to teenagers who want to feel like they can change society by rebelling against it) so demand is created by the very laws designed to reduce it.
(Of course teenagers will still find drugs interesting if they are merely age-restricted but it's going to be mre difficult for them to obtain them. Currently they just have to ask that guy who always hang sout near the schoolyard.)
B
Banning something and hoping it just somehow goes away is like pretending your OS won't be trashed if you make
It's not a Godwin if you don't compare anyone to Hitler or the Nazis so I will make one point using them: The Nazis showed how malleable society's standards and morals are. Feed someone, give them work and offer them easy solutions to difficult problems and they will believe anything you say. Do that with enough people and society's morals will change to whatever you want them to be.
The laws should reflect society's standards and morals but they should also attempt to moderate, especially if society wants things that aren't quite compatible with things like the declaration of human rights.
The problem with alcohol prohibition is the same as with drug prohibition: It simplay doesn't work. In fact, I posit that it aggravates the problem - the supply is still there but controlled by organized crime, demand is high and quality goes way down. Don't expect people to stop drinking just because the state says so. They'd rather pay Uncle Al a hundred bucks for a bottle of Mexican it's-almost-like-whisky, which is even potable if you add water.
Prohibition mean that the state oses all control over the substance. It becomes more expensive but peope circumvent that by paying more. However, none of that money goes to the state and all of it goes to the smuggler ring that organized the goods. There are no quality controls either (as well as no care for quality), so alcohol becomes even more unhealthy. Also, the only thing keeping children from procuring booze is the honesty of the man selling it... who is a criminal interested in getting the stuff off his hands.
Additionally, alcohol would become an entry drug for hard stuff like heroin - after all it's sold by the same people who are very interested in upselling their customers on the "premium stuff". As others have pointed out, meth is pretty cheap so it might end up complementing booze when supplies are low.
Alcohol prohibition is an exceedingly bad idea. You can't keep people from doing something they really want. Regulation offers a good way of mediating alcohol access - the state (and not criminals) makes money, quality is high, minors can't easily buy booze... that's pretty good already.
Now imagine hemp worked like that. Only quality hemp without any funky additives, minors can't buy it, the state can tax and regulate it, drug traffickers lose money because they can't price-match the legal stuff and already-existing alcohol abuse legislation (with some tweaks) could be applied to protect people from themselves.
It's always better to accept that bad things exist and work with them instead of putting your head in the sand and hoping they just disappear. Prohibition is the latter.
Before someone points out that an LLC is very similar to a GmbH: Yes, I should have used something like Kommanditgesellschaft instead. I only noticed the blunder after posting.
For the same reason you can't register a company in the United States as a Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung: There is no such thing in our law. We have the similar concept of Gemeinfreiheit but German copyright is mandatory: You create a work, it's protected. Gemeinfreiheit reduces the protection but only applies to certain government resources.
A free licence is the best thing you can do in Germany - except for waiting for the work's copyright to run out, which may well take centuries if the terms keep getting extended. Since even the WW2 pictures are not old enough to lose copyright protection CC really was one of the best options they had.
But "unrestricted use" was not the question. The question was "is this under a Wikimedia Commons-accepted free license or public domain". They didn't delete the picture because they couldn't use it, they deleted it because it collided with their rulebook. This was not a case of overbearing copyright law, it was simply a case of beaureaucracy.
They're making a cast of his face, probably for some "racial hygiene" reason. The original caption in the archive speculates that the man might be a Sinti or Roma, which would explain why they're so interested in his face.
Strict gun laws can work but only if they were strict from the beginning. Germany had relatively strict gun laws ever since its inception (sixty years ago) and we do have fewer cases of guns used in crimes. It's hard to get a gun legally, which also means it's hard to get a gun illegally (as there aren't many illegal imports as weapon trafficking is difficult and dangerous and the German market consists of people used to not using guns).
Now compare that to the USA. There are lots of guns around and it's easy to obtain one. If strict gun laws would be imposed on everyone, the criminals still had a vast ocean of guns they can secure for themselves before the new laws go live. Thus, harsher gun laws don't do much to help leople agaist violent criminals.
Gun control can keep new guns from entering the system but it's bad at removing existing ones from it. Thus it makes much mre sense when used in a country where there are few privately owned guns to begin with.
I quote from the flavor text of the Booster Tutor card: Real men use Arabian Nights boosters.
By the way, the Un-sets (Unglued and Unhinged) are surprisingly useful in spicing up old decks. Of course you get a lot of chaff and technically the Un-sets aren't legal, well, just about everywhere. But it's not like Rocket Powered Turbo Slug or Goblin S.W.A.T. Team are particularly overpowered...
For some reason it's having some kind of a renaissance among my friends, with some just picking it up for the first time. As someone who plays using mostly his old Fifth Edition cards I'm pretty frustrated - pretty much everything from about Eigth Edition onwards is seriously overpowered, with the latest set, Shards of Alara, being the worst; it contains gems like this one.
;)
If you're thinking of picking up Magic again I advise either getting a Tenth Edition* deck (so you won't be comletely outgunned) and never plaing against someone with an Elf dack (those can produce infinite Mana) or only playing against people who stick to the older editions. Or getting something like Magic Workstation, a nifty (if somewhat buggy) program that allows you to build decks and play Magic online. The trial verison isn't too limited, just a nag screen and limited solitaire play.
A note to the mods: Before you mod this -1, Offtopic remember that this is more nerdy than most of the news you see on this site nowadays so it deserves a little credit for that.
* Mirrodin/Darksteel/Fifth Dawn work, too. If you're into artifact decks these contain all you need to build an indestructible army that doesn't require any mana to play. Which is about on par with the rest of the newer sets.
But (if I read TFA correctly) she was acquitted from contributing to someone's death; the federal crime she's getting nailed with is entirely about doing things on the internet.
Either use Plain Old Text (like the sibling recommended) or put
at the end of each line (if you want to use HTML formatting).
Very true. JAG Attorney (a 3/3 white Soldier creature card) only has "[Tap]: Prevent any damage from any one source dealt to target Soldier this turn." and the damage has already occurred several turns ago so tapping it won't help the OP. Since we don't want to deflect but rather deal damage, the correct procedure would of course be to declare the JAG Attorney as an attacker.
OTOH, if the new hardware doesn't work either they simply get bad PR. See Nvidia and Vista.
I already said it: Most sane people are not going to install some random driver I give them and then reboot their system just so they can mount whatever filesystem I'm using. Keeping Windows fast and stable is enough work without adding random IFSes and all *nix users I know reboot about once a month tops so losing their open applications to install a kernel module is a major inconvenience to them.
Would you install some random kernel-level software and reboot just because someone wants to plug their USB drive into your computer? I certainly wouldn't. And it doesn't matter that the guy who wrote the driver proclaims on his website that "during my private testing I have found it to be 100% reliable"; random third-party drivers are not something one usually associates with a stable system.
It has to be official native support. Everything else will keep access to your data restricted to a subset of all machines.