Actually, Groklaw has begun to deal with other cases of dubious IP claims and attacks on free software, open standards, and so forth, so it will still have a reason for existence once SCO is kaput. The current top article, for example, is about the ISO BRM on OOXML.
I am quite familiar with the regulations. First, what I wrote was unequivocally true until the regulations were changed in 2004. The regulations actually discussed "fully hosted" travel to Cuba and conceded that it was legal, although they also asserted a rebuttable presumption that travelers to Cuba have engaged in prohibited transactions.
In 2004 the regulations were changed. On the one hand, the assertion of a presumption was deleted. On the other hand, OFAC now asserts that even receiving goods and services free constitutes engaging in a prohibited transaction, thus eliminating the fully hosted travel exception. Thus, you are sort of right as of 2004. However, the picture is not so simple.
For one thing, the crucial change is merely OFAC's interpretation. It is not the law. OFAC has engaged in other extremely dubious interpretations of the law, such as its claim that American scientific journals violated the regulations by publishing papers from authors in countries subject to boycott. This latter interpretations contradicts explicit statements of legislative intent and is widely regarded as wrong. OFAC's current claim that receipt of free goods and services constitutes a prohibited transaction is also quite dubious.
A second factor is that since OFAC's new interpretation would effectively prohibit unlicensed travel to Cuba, a country with which the US is not at war, there is a colorable argument that it is unconstitutional.
Finally, in practice, it is not easy for OFAC to enforce its interpretation. To begin with, they've got to be able to prove that you have been to Cuba. Depending on how you go, that may not be so easy. In any case, suppose they know you've been to Cuba and you do not have a license. What happens? They send you a letter demanding information about your trip, or, if they are more aggressive, they send you a notice threatening to impose a fine. In the latter case, you demand a hearing, which they must grant you before taking any further action. The last I knew, they have never proceeded to a hearing. In the former case, you are not obligated to answer their questions, which violate your Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate yourself.
So, the fact of the matter is that there is no outright prohibition on travel to Cuba.
Rather, there are restrictions on financial transactions, which have the effect of prohibiting travel to Cuba unless either (a) one obtains a license, which is possible in some circumstances, or (b) you go "fully hosted". Since 2004 OFAC has tried to eliminate the latter option, but its attempt is of dubious legality, and in practice it is difficult for OFAC to enforce its interpretation.
What you may be thinking of with regard to the travel agencies has to do with "all expense paid tours". The idea was that all of the expenses that one would normally have in Cuba would be paid by a travel agency operating out of a third country not subject to US jurisdiction. The traveler would thus in theory not have to spend any money in Cuba and so would fall under the "fully hosted" exception. As noted above, since 2004 OFAC has attempted to eliminate the "fully hosted" exception, but in any case, OFAC is no doubt correct that merely passing the funds via a third party does not constitute "fully hosted" travel, so these tours were in fact illegal even prior to the 2004 changes.
Because sending a corpse to Mars would be a huge waste of payload on an un-manned mission. Outside of science fiction, we can't freeze people and revive them.
I'd say that Tcl is actually a funky dialect of Lisp, one with a reasonable amount of syntactic sugar. Tcl "commands" are not statements, they are expressions. They return values. In fact,
you can use a rather functional style in Tcl. Tcl also has the "code is data" property. You can generate code and eval it on the fly.
Not exactly. US citizens are free to visit Cuba so long as they don't spend any money there. The US has a trade embargo on Cuba which makes it illegal for US nationals to engage in trade with Cuba. That makes it impossible for most people, but it is possible if someone else pays your expenses. In addition, it is possible in limited circumstances to get a license from the Treasury Department allowing you to spend money in Cuba.
Uh, there are such things as curtains and shutters.
The Japanese didn't see the benefit of DST. The US imposed it during the Occupation. The first thing the Japanese government did when it regained control was get rid of it.
Many states have freedom of speech provisions in their constitutions, sometimes provisions that are stronger than the First Amendment. State courts certainly do rule on these. Furthermore, a state court can and will rule on whether a state law violates the federal constitution. The US Supreme Court of course has the last say, but that doesn't prevent a state court from addressing the issue.
I went through the history of the English article and couldn't find anything about the parking issue, but I found it in the Italian wikipedia, here.
It's just a brief item in a list of criticisms attributed to opposition parties:
l'affidamento dei parcheggi cittadini alla società "Firenze Parcheggi" del cui cda fanno parte le mogli di Domenici e dell'assessore Cioni
I don't see how this is actionable. It is merely a correct report of what other people have publicly said.
This is definitely not true unless you are informed that you will not receive the original unit back and agree to this. There may be some companies that have people sign a form agreeing to such conditions when they send a unit in for repair, but many don't. In that case, they are obligated to return the original unit. In the absence of an agreement to the contrary, the company doesn't get to set a policy unilaterally. Such transactions are governed by law.
What you say may be true if individuals go home (I don't know what the Taliban policy is on this - some such organizations, in spite of their brutality, allow people to come and go according to their personal needs if they aren't actually in battle), but not if the organization as a whole decides to give up, which is what I was thinking of.
Do you really think that the Afghan government is going to hunt down all of the Taliban if they put down their arms and go home? That is very unlikely. Doing so would just rekindle the fighting - remember that in their home areas the Taliban have a lot of support. The Taliban could indeed give up. The leaders would need to take refuge in areas which they control or in which they can hide, or go to a safe place, such as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. The rest could just stop fighting and go home.
The article is very likely right, but I don't see it happening, because what drives Microsoft is not so much profit as control and being seen as top dog in the computer world. Even if it proved even more profitable than their current business, MS would not be happy ceding its dominant position in the personal computer world and becoming a backstage purveyor of business software and services. MS would be obsessed with Google even if there were no threat from network applications because Google has been much more successful in an arena visible to the average person.
I've just looked at the Wikipedia article, and I think that we may be talking about different panels. The NAFTA panel with three Americans and two Canadians is the more recent one, under "Lumber IV" in the Wikipedia article. The earlier panel, discussed under "Lumber III", did, I think, have three Canadians and two Americans.
I agree, if the criticism of the US is that signing Kyoto obligated it to ratify, that's wrong. If the criticism is that the US ought to ratify Kyoto,
that's another matter.
Listing the manufacturer's suggested price is actually useful. Granted, lots of people will get the book discounted or in another country, but the manufacturer's price gives a good idea of the price range.
This is B.S. on many levels. To begin with, in many respects Canadian copyright law is stronger than that of the U.S. In any case, Canada has no obligation to conform to the WIPO treaty. Canada has signed the WIPO treaty but has not ratified it. Signing a treaty merely indicates the intention of the then current government. As the Hon. Jim Prentice, the Minister responsible for this file, commented, the relationship between signing a treaty and ratifying it is like that between dating and marriage. Nothing is binding until the treaty is ratified, and Canada has never ratified the WIPO treaty.
As to fulfilling treaty obligations, for the US to complain about Canada is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Take the softwood lumber dispute, for example. The US illegally imposed billions of dollars in tariffs and planned, illegally, to give them to US lumber companies. The US consistently lost at the NAFTA dispute panel, even though three of the five panel members were Americans. The dispute was temporarily resolved when the new Conservative minority government gave in to the US in spite of being in the right legally, but the US is making trouble again and there is a good chance that the agreement will not last.
I hope that you didn't get your hopes too high. If you've read some other/. discussions of IP issues, you will have discovered that many people here don't understand the difference between copyrights, patents, and trademarks, or between civil and criminal law.
I am well aware of the warrior monks. Their existence is relevant to the nature of pacifism in Buddhism, but not to the question of religiously motivated terrorism. The question is whether there have been religiously motivated Buddhist terrorists.
Pol Pot may have been brought up a Buddhist but I doubt that he was a believer and practitioner. In any case, his crimes are not attributable to any form of Buddhism. There's a difference between being a member of a religion and engaging in terrorism or some other kind of crime, and being motivated by a religion to do so.
Well, in the case of Buddhists, how about Burma, one of the most repressive and corrupt governments on earth? Or Tibet, occupied by China for more than half a century, with a massive influx of Han colonists, considerable brutality, and cultural genocide? Baha'is are severely persecuted in Iran and treated badly in most other Muslim countries. Mennonites were persecuted in the Soviet Union.
None of these situations has led to terrorism at all comparable to what we see with Islam.
In any case, the argument that Islamic terrorism is a response to oppression doesn't really work. Saudi Arabia is indeed an oppressive country, but the terrorists are not people who oppose this sort of oppression - they are people who think that Saudi Arabia is not Islamic enough. Nor can Palestinian terrorism reasonably be related to oppression. Arabs in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have had more rights under Israeli rule than they did under Jordanian rule. Most of their problems are their own creation. (You do know that 5/6 of the deaths of Palestinians in the West Bank are at the hands of other Palestinians, not Israel?) Studies of Palestinian suicide bombers show that they generally come from middle class families that have not particularly suffered, not from the poor and oppressed.
Generally speaking, there is no correlation between the legitimacy and extent of a people's grievances and the extent to which they engage in terrorism. Muslim terrorists, or, say, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, are no worse off than the Tibetans, but you don't see the Tibetans turning to terrorism. Its hard to see these differences as due to anything other than different degrees of cultural acceptance of terrorism and ways of addressing problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Groklaw has begun to deal with other cases of dubious IP claims and attacks on free software, open standards, and so forth, so it will still have a reason for existence once SCO is kaput. The current top article, for example, is about the ISO BRM on OOXML.
I am quite familiar with the regulations. First, what I wrote was unequivocally true until the regulations were changed in 2004. The regulations actually discussed "fully hosted" travel to Cuba and conceded that it was legal, although they also asserted a rebuttable presumption that travelers to Cuba have engaged in prohibited transactions.
In 2004 the regulations were changed. On the one hand, the assertion of a presumption was deleted. On the other hand, OFAC now asserts that even receiving goods and services free constitutes engaging in a prohibited transaction, thus eliminating the fully hosted travel exception. Thus, you are sort of right as of 2004. However, the picture is not so simple.
For one thing, the crucial change is merely OFAC's interpretation. It is not the law. OFAC has engaged in other extremely dubious interpretations of the law, such as its claim that American scientific journals violated the regulations by publishing papers from authors in countries subject to boycott. This latter interpretations contradicts explicit statements of legislative intent and is widely regarded as wrong. OFAC's current claim that receipt of free goods and services constitutes a prohibited transaction is also quite dubious.
A second factor is that since OFAC's new interpretation would effectively prohibit unlicensed travel to Cuba, a country with which the US is not at war, there is a colorable argument that it is unconstitutional.
Finally, in practice, it is not easy for OFAC to enforce its interpretation. To begin with, they've got to be able to prove that you have been to Cuba. Depending on how you go, that may not be so easy. In any case, suppose they know you've been to Cuba and you do not have a license. What happens? They send you a letter demanding information about your trip, or, if they are more aggressive, they send you a notice threatening to impose a fine. In the latter case, you demand a hearing, which they must grant you before taking any further action. The last I knew, they have never proceeded to a hearing. In the former case, you are not obligated to answer their questions, which violate your Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate yourself.
So, the fact of the matter is that there is no outright prohibition on travel to Cuba. Rather, there are restrictions on financial transactions, which have the effect of prohibiting travel to Cuba unless either (a) one obtains a license, which is possible in some circumstances, or (b) you go "fully hosted". Since 2004 OFAC has tried to eliminate the latter option, but its attempt is of dubious legality, and in practice it is difficult for OFAC to enforce its interpretation.
What you may be thinking of with regard to the travel agencies has to do with "all expense paid tours". The idea was that all of the expenses that one would normally have in Cuba would be paid by a travel agency operating out of a third country not subject to US jurisdiction. The traveler would thus in theory not have to spend any money in Cuba and so would fall under the "fully hosted" exception. As noted above, since 2004 OFAC has attempted to eliminate the "fully hosted" exception, but in any case, OFAC is no doubt correct that merely passing the funds via a third party does not constitute "fully hosted" travel, so these tours were in fact illegal even prior to the 2004 changes.
Because sending a corpse to Mars would be a huge waste of payload on an un-manned mission. Outside of science fiction, we can't freeze people and revive them.
I'd say that Tcl is actually a funky dialect of Lisp, one with a reasonable amount of syntactic sugar. Tcl "commands" are not statements, they are expressions. They return values. In fact, you can use a rather functional style in Tcl. Tcl also has the "code is data" property. You can generate code and eval it on the fly.
Not exactly. US citizens are free to visit Cuba so long as they don't spend any money there. The US has a trade embargo on Cuba which makes it illegal for US nationals to engage in trade with Cuba. That makes it impossible for most people, but it is possible if someone else pays your expenses. In addition, it is possible in limited circumstances to get a license from the Treasury Department allowing you to spend money in Cuba.
Uh, there are such things as curtains and shutters.
The Japanese didn't see the benefit of DST. The US imposed it during the Occupation. The first thing the Japanese government did when it regained control was get rid of it.
Many states have freedom of speech provisions in their constitutions, sometimes provisions that are stronger than the First Amendment. State courts certainly do rule on these. Furthermore, a state court can and will rule on whether a state law violates the federal constitution. The US Supreme Court of course has the last say, but that doesn't prevent a state court from addressing the issue.
I went through the history of the English article and couldn't find anything about the parking issue, but I found it in the Italian wikipedia, here. It's just a brief item in a list of criticisms attributed to opposition parties:
I don't see how this is actionable. It is merely a correct report of what other people have publicly said.
This is definitely not true unless you are informed that you will not receive the original unit back and agree to this. There may be some companies that have people sign a form agreeing to such conditions when they send a unit in for repair, but many don't. In that case, they are obligated to return the original unit. In the absence of an agreement to the contrary, the company doesn't get to set a policy unilaterally. Such transactions are governed by law.
What you say may be true if individuals go home (I don't know what the Taliban policy is on this - some such organizations, in spite of their brutality, allow people to come and go according to their personal needs if they aren't actually in battle), but not if the organization as a whole decides to give up, which is what I was thinking of.
Do you really think that the Afghan government is going to hunt down all of the Taliban if they put down their arms and go home? That is very unlikely. Doing so would just rekindle the fighting - remember that in their home areas the Taliban have a lot of support. The Taliban could indeed give up. The leaders would need to take refuge in areas which they control or in which they can hide, or go to a safe place, such as Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. The rest could just stop fighting and go home.
The article is very likely right, but I don't see it happening, because what drives Microsoft is not so much profit as control and being seen as top dog in the computer world. Even if it proved even more profitable than their current business, MS would not be happy ceding its dominant position in the personal computer world and becoming a backstage purveyor of business software and services. MS would be obsessed with Google even if there were no threat from network applications because Google has been much more successful in an arena visible to the average person.
Heck, I've still got the 20MB external hard drive that I used to attach to my diskless laptop's parallel port around 1991.
I've just looked at the Wikipedia article, and I think that we may be talking about different panels. The NAFTA panel with three Americans and two Canadians is the more recent one, under "Lumber IV" in the Wikipedia article. The earlier panel, discussed under "Lumber III", did, I think, have three Canadians and two Americans.
Here are references supporting the three American/two Canadian split:
I agree, if the criticism of the US is that signing Kyoto obligated it to ratify, that's wrong. If the criticism is that the US ought to ratify Kyoto, that's another matter.
Listing the manufacturer's suggested price is actually useful. Granted, lots of people will get the book discounted or in another country, but the manufacturer's price gives a good idea of the price range.
This is B.S. on many levels. To begin with, in many respects Canadian copyright law is stronger than that of the U.S. In any case, Canada has no obligation to conform to the WIPO treaty. Canada has signed the WIPO treaty but has not ratified it. Signing a treaty merely indicates the intention of the then current government. As the Hon. Jim Prentice, the Minister responsible for this file, commented, the relationship between signing a treaty and ratifying it is like that between dating and marriage. Nothing is binding until the treaty is ratified, and Canada has never ratified the WIPO treaty.
As to fulfilling treaty obligations, for the US to complain about Canada is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Take the softwood lumber dispute, for example. The US illegally imposed billions of dollars in tariffs and planned, illegally, to give them to US lumber companies. The US consistently lost at the NAFTA dispute panel, even though three of the five panel members were Americans. The dispute was temporarily resolved when the new Conservative minority government gave in to the US in spite of being in the right legally, but the US is making trouble again and there is a good chance that the agreement will not last.
Troll??? The moderators who don't recognize a joke must be out in force.
Yes, three products, but what good are they? They don't run on Linux!
At only $8 each, I'm surprised that enough people buy tax maps for that to constitute a significant revenue stream. How many do they sell?
I hope that you didn't get your hopes too high. If you've read some other /. discussions of IP issues, you will have discovered that many people here don't understand the difference between copyrights, patents, and trademarks, or between civil and criminal law.
I am well aware of the warrior monks. Their existence is relevant to the nature of pacifism in Buddhism, but not to the question of religiously motivated terrorism. The question is whether there have been religiously motivated Buddhist terrorists.
Pol Pot may have been brought up a Buddhist but I doubt that he was a believer and practitioner. In any case, his crimes are not attributable to any form of Buddhism. There's a difference between being a member of a religion and engaging in terrorism or some other kind of crime, and being motivated by a religion to do so.
Well, in the case of Buddhists, how about Burma, one of the most repressive and corrupt governments on earth? Or Tibet, occupied by China for more than half a century, with a massive influx of Han colonists, considerable brutality, and cultural genocide? Baha'is are severely persecuted in Iran and treated badly in most other Muslim countries. Mennonites were persecuted in the Soviet Union. None of these situations has led to terrorism at all comparable to what we see with Islam.
In any case, the argument that Islamic terrorism is a response to oppression doesn't really work. Saudi Arabia is indeed an oppressive country, but the terrorists are not people who oppose this sort of oppression - they are people who think that Saudi Arabia is not Islamic enough. Nor can Palestinian terrorism reasonably be related to oppression. Arabs in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have had more rights under Israeli rule than they did under Jordanian rule. Most of their problems are their own creation. (You do know that 5/6 of the deaths of Palestinians in the West Bank are at the hands of other Palestinians, not Israel?) Studies of Palestinian suicide bombers show that they generally come from middle class families that have not particularly suffered, not from the poor and oppressed.
Generally speaking, there is no correlation between the legitimacy and extent of a people's grievances and the extent to which they engage in terrorism. Muslim terrorists, or, say, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, are no worse off than the Tibetans, but you don't see the Tibetans turning to terrorism. Its hard to see these differences as due to anything other than different degrees of cultural acceptance of terrorism and ways of addressing problems.