If memory serves, both Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro explicitly sent their condolences and offered assistance immediately following the 11-Sep attacks. I also recall that the State Department ignored them -- presumably treating them as rather insincere.
Saddam does still have the ability to avert war, should he choose exile. Of course, for such a deal to be meaningful, he would need to convince not only the CIA but also the Mossad to honor such an agreement. Simply providing evidence to back up their utterly unsubstantiated claims that they destroyed tons of chemical weapons -- AFTER resolutions stipulating that destruction should be positively verifiable -- would help. But making such claims, without bothering to provide so much as a videotape, does not help their cause.
Starvation; deliberate famine; malaise caused by incompetent, malevolent kleptocracies; tribal warfare and religious strife; civil war; and similar topics aren't exactly news -- at least, say, in Africa. Anybody who's read a decent internationally-aware newspaper should be aware of those by now. AP, AFP, Reuters, and UPI all produce constant wire reports reminding people that humanity hasn't inexplicably become humane. 'sides from that, most readers in the US media markets are unlikely to be able to do jack squat about, say, whether it's the Hutus or the Tutsis who have the upper hand that week, or stopping such conflicts altogether. On the other hand, Americans/can/ have an indirect voice on space policy by contacting their representatives.
Large-scale terrorist attacks on US soil are fairly rare, especially when you restrict the search area to the US itself (i.e. not embassies or other overseas holdings). So, for that matter, are catastrophic failures involving spacecraft.
Just imagine if, instead, hordes of AOL's former customers were kidnapped by gigantic, vaguely anthropomorphic, highly colorful (poisonous?) butterflies.
You've violated laws simply by making them available, since that sort of behavior is specifically mentioned in the US Code where it defines "public performance", even if nobody takes advantage of it.
"Abandonware" and related concepts are myths, probably invented by selfish 12-year-olds to justify to themselves downloading w4r3z over the family modem.
Rarity, cost and overall difficulty are no excuse under the law.
Bingo. The fundamental problem is that no technological method can automatically determine whether such access is infringing or not. Ergo, any such measure must either permit infringing, or prohibit legitimate activity.
I don't give a damn if copyright holders start suing and ruining individual "sharers". I don't care if Verizon feels that it deserves the "safe harbor" protections of the DMCA without the obligations the very same provision gives it. If people keep electing Congressmen that extend copyright, it's the peoples' fault, not SCOTUS's.
But I do care if they deliberately take measures that block such reasonable activity as migrating data between one machine to another when one's retired, or stopping First Sale by making interpersonal transfers impossible.
Christ --
Yeshua was arrested and killed. Has few actual/practicing/ followers, despite how many claim to. Charity? Willingness to forgive? Injunctions against greed and usury? Loving the sinner? Avoiding gluttony and pride? Yeah, right.
Ghandi --
Assassinated. Only got some modicum of success because of all the colonial powers, the UK was possibly unique in having a conscience. Strife continues in India, in case you haven't noticed.
Dr. King --
Assassinated. Ideals practically dead, with most prominent "civil rights" advocates demanding special status for people that just happen to look like them and insisting on seeing everything through the prism of race.
The Dalai Lama --
Exiled. Has completely failed to win autonomy for the Tibetans. Has nothing more than some minimal celebrity value these days.
Open a history book. Study, say, the five thousand or so years of recorded history; I think you'll find that just about any atrocity that you could think of, and probably more. For instance, in 260 BC a victorious army from the kingdom of Qin buried alive some four hundred thousand soldiers of the defeated kingdom of Zhao. Raping, dismembering, torture, you name it -- humanity has committed it.
Then realize that sometimes it doesn't matter what "generally" is true. Even if 99.9% of people are "nice", they don't matter at all if they do nothing to stop the 0.1% who aren't. Shot once or shot a thousand times, you're quite possibly still dead.
And if you expect some multinational coalition to save the innocent... go ask the surviving residents of Srbenecia how well protected they were by the Dutch "peacekeepers" that stood by and let the Serbs take away their neighbors.
...with the exception of Tarantino movies or screenplays based on Shakespearean tragedies, in which just about everybody usually dies.;)
WRT to FPSs, it really depends. In Doom/Quake-like games, for instance, the combination of ubelievably good armor + healing powerups is a bit unrealistic. Hell, you might be able to take an anti-tank rocket and live. In the MechWarrior games, unless you're pretty darn close and are fighting against fairly odd designs (like, say, a 100-ton mech armed with four or more Ultra AC20s on group fire...) you can usually take some shots and still limp away.
On the other hand, in Tom Clancy-based games, getting shot once ==> you're quite possibly dead. And since the AIs in those games tend to be darn good shots, that places a bit of emphasis on being a bit more careful such as using grenades / flashbangs rather than pretending that you can simply run in and bang-bang-bang.
...or, the extra income pushes him into AMT land. Oooh, fun. One issue of _Forbes Magazine_ quite some time ago (a year or more) mentioned a few instances where people encountered, effectively, a >100% marginal tax rate because of this phenomenon. It's rare, but AFAIK it's still theoretically possible.
Or Pennsylvania, where our roads are always under repair due to cracking, probably well sub-standard asphalt. It's remarkable how much road maintenance, and therefore how many opportunities there are for union labor, there is in this state.
1- It's unenforceable because (a) nobody tracks such things, and (b) go ahead, convince admins in South Korea, China and Taiwan to collect a tax for the US. Yeah, right.
2- It's arbitrary. What constitutes bulk email? If the sender uses a script to send 1000 slightly different (random junk attached) e-mails, would that qualify? How about two mailings of size 999 each, 30 seconds apart? How about two people from the same company each mailing out the same message, 500 times each?
3- It's pointless, because of the above two points. Even if it were enacted, it'd be about as effective as asking consumers to pay Use Tax on all those mail-order and online purchases from out-of-state companies. It's not legal in most states, but I'd figure that a/large/ percentage of transactions via AMZN are currently treated as tax-free by customers.
Plenty of ways, such as markings on the envelope only visible under certain kinds of light, or simply very tiny ones... and one could also play a variety of tricks inside the box, as well.
Prometheus was chained to a rock, his liver and entrails being perpetually torn apart by eagles, until rescued by a figure who later inspired a Sam Raimi-produced action/comedy. Perhaps they could have chosen a more auspicious name?
- The market's desire for eye candy and polish. Art costs money. Even if an artist is absolutely DRIVEN by the desire to create and doesn't really care about money -- a common contention on Slashdot -- he's still got to eat and pay rent. "Craft" and "FreeCiv" haven't exactly dethroned Blizzard's *craft or MicroProse/Firaxis's Civ* games yet, and part of the reason is that they're a hell of a lot less polished.
- Man-hours do count. Every piece of software could be improved, be it in interface, in stability, or what-not. Bigger houses can devote more programmers and more testers.
- The costs of marketing and distribution. It's harder to break into retail if you're unknown. Production and shipping costs may be higher, proportionally, for smaller runs.
For a niche market, like turn-based strongly historical, detailed wargames then certain considerations may go away. For instance, wargamers, usually being an older and less twitchy audience, don't seem to demand FMV intros or voice-overs. However, the RTS crowd may differ in its tastes...
Quantity. The number of people who write, act, sing, et al is far higher than those that do it well, and random sampling from a consumer's POV is going to take a bloody long time to find the worthwhile bits.
Bingo. It's not the judicial system's job to be sure Congress behaves nicely; it's only their job to make sure it acts legally. And when people, for the most part, vote for silly reasons such as party or charisma or how handsome a candidate looked during a debate (thank you, JFK for demonstrating the influence of physical appearance on politics -- the curious should look up the different reactions of people to the televised/and/ radio-broadcast Nixon-Kennedy debates), it's not the judicial system's job to fix that, either.
You're dead wrong. SCOTUS has no power to block the/stupid/, but merely the illegal. Punishing Congress for passing merely stupid (or even malicious), but perfectly legal, legislation is strictly the job of the voters. Care about it? Vote, and explain to others who don't care yet why you think they should.
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If memory serves, both Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro explicitly sent their condolences and offered assistance immediately following the 11-Sep attacks. I also recall that the State Department ignored them -- presumably treating them as rather insincere.
Saddam does still have the ability to avert war, should he choose exile. Of course, for such a deal to be meaningful, he would need to convince not only the CIA but also the Mossad to honor such an agreement. Simply providing evidence to back up their utterly unsubstantiated claims that they destroyed tons of chemical weapons -- AFTER resolutions stipulating that destruction should be positively verifiable -- would help. But making such claims, without bothering to provide so much as a videotape, does not help their cause.
Starvation; deliberate famine; malaise caused by incompetent, malevolent kleptocracies; tribal warfare and religious strife; civil war; and similar topics aren't exactly news -- at least, say, in Africa. Anybody who's read a decent internationally-aware newspaper should be aware of those by now. AP, AFP, Reuters, and UPI all produce constant wire reports reminding people that humanity hasn't inexplicably become humane. 'sides from that, most readers in the US media markets are unlikely to be able to do jack squat about, say, whether it's the Hutus or the Tutsis who have the upper hand that week, or stopping such conflicts altogether. On the other hand, Americans /can/ have an indirect voice on space policy by contacting their representatives.
Large-scale terrorist attacks on US soil are fairly rare, especially when you restrict the search area to the US itself (i.e. not embassies or other overseas holdings). So, for that matter, are catastrophic failures involving spacecraft.
'side from the difficulty, to maximize damage you'd want to down it EARLY, when the solid-fuel boosters are still attached.
Just imagine if, instead, hordes of AOL's former customers were kidnapped by gigantic, vaguely anthropomorphic, highly colorful (poisonous?) butterflies.
I-E-O, O-O. I-E-O, O-O...
Hey, it worked for the Egyptians for thousands of years. Just include some redundancy for errosion-correction, and...
You've violated laws simply by making them available, since that sort of behavior is specifically mentioned in the US Code where it defines "public performance", even if nobody takes advantage of it.
Perhaps a fellow named Ed Sullivan also had something to do with it, no? Publicity matters.
"Abandonware" and related concepts are myths, probably invented by selfish 12-year-olds to justify to themselves downloading w4r3z over the family modem.
Rarity, cost and overall difficulty are no excuse under the law.
Bingo. The fundamental problem is that no technological method can automatically determine whether such access is infringing or not. Ergo, any such measure must either permit infringing, or prohibit legitimate activity.
I don't give a damn if copyright holders start suing and ruining individual "sharers". I don't care if Verizon feels that it deserves the "safe harbor" protections of the DMCA without the obligations the very same provision gives it. If people keep electing Congressmen that extend copyright, it's the peoples' fault, not SCOTUS's.
But I do care if they deliberately take measures that block such reasonable activity as migrating data between one machine to another when one's retired, or stopping First Sale by making interpersonal transfers impossible.
Boy, you chose some winners there.
/practicing/ followers, despite how many claim to. Charity? Willingness to forgive? Injunctions against greed and usury? Loving the sinner? Avoiding gluttony and pride? Yeah, right.
Christ --
Yeshua was arrested and killed. Has few actual
Ghandi --
Assassinated. Only got some modicum of success because of all the colonial powers, the UK was possibly unique in having a conscience. Strife continues in India, in case you haven't noticed.
Dr. King --
Assassinated. Ideals practically dead, with most prominent "civil rights" advocates demanding special status for people that just happen to look like them and insisting on seeing everything through the prism of race.
The Dalai Lama --
Exiled. Has completely failed to win autonomy for the Tibetans. Has nothing more than some minimal celebrity value these days.
Oh, maybe the last time the Iranians shot at them -- probably during the mutual loathing of Reagan and Khomeini.
Open a history book. Study, say, the five thousand or so years of recorded history; I think you'll find that just about any atrocity that you could think of, and probably more. For instance, in 260 BC a victorious army from the kingdom of Qin buried alive some four hundred thousand soldiers of the defeated kingdom of Zhao. Raping, dismembering, torture, you name it -- humanity has committed it.
Then realize that sometimes it doesn't matter what "generally" is true. Even if 99.9% of people are "nice", they don't matter at all if they do nothing to stop the 0.1% who aren't. Shot once or shot a thousand times, you're quite possibly still dead.
And if you expect some multinational coalition to save the innocent... go ask the surviving residents of Srbenecia how well protected they were by the Dutch "peacekeepers" that stood by and let the Serbs take away their neighbors.
...with the exception of Tarantino movies or screenplays based on Shakespearean tragedies, in which just about everybody usually dies. ;)
WRT to FPSs, it really depends. In Doom/Quake-like games, for instance, the combination of ubelievably good armor + healing powerups is a bit unrealistic. Hell, you might be able to take an anti-tank rocket and live. In the MechWarrior games, unless you're pretty darn close and are fighting against fairly odd designs (like, say, a 100-ton mech armed with four or more Ultra AC20s on group fire...) you can usually take some shots and still limp away.
On the other hand, in Tom Clancy-based games, getting shot once ==> you're quite possibly dead. And since the AIs in those games tend to be darn good shots, that places a bit of emphasis on being a bit more careful such as using grenades / flashbangs rather than pretending that you can simply run in and bang-bang-bang.
...or, the extra income pushes him into AMT land. Oooh, fun. One issue of _Forbes Magazine_ quite some time ago (a year or more) mentioned a few instances where people encountered, effectively, a >100% marginal tax rate because of this phenomenon. It's rare, but AFAIK it's still theoretically possible.
Or Pennsylvania, where our roads are always under repair due to cracking, probably well sub-standard asphalt. It's remarkable how much road maintenance, and therefore how many opportunities there are for union labor, there is in this state.
Unenforceable, arbitrary and pointless.
/large/ percentage of transactions via AMZN are currently treated as tax-free by customers.
1- It's unenforceable because (a) nobody tracks such things, and (b) go ahead, convince admins in South Korea, China and Taiwan to collect a tax for the US. Yeah, right.
2- It's arbitrary. What constitutes bulk email? If the sender uses a script to send 1000 slightly different (random junk attached) e-mails, would that qualify? How about two mailings of size 999 each, 30 seconds apart? How about two people from the same company each mailing out the same message, 500 times each?
3- It's pointless, because of the above two points. Even if it were enacted, it'd be about as effective as asking consumers to pay Use Tax on all those mail-order and online purchases from out-of-state companies. It's not legal in most states, but I'd figure that a
Your very public expulsion, that's what.
With cryptographic signatures, it could easily be made harder than simply erasing a number or tossing a ballot box into the San Francisco harbor.
Plenty of ways, such as markings on the envelope only visible under certain kinds of light, or simply very tiny ones... and one could also play a variety of tricks inside the box, as well.
Plus, have you checked for hidden cameras?
Prometheus was chained to a rock, his liver and entrails being perpetually torn apart by eagles, until rescued by a figure who later inspired a Sam Raimi-produced action/comedy. Perhaps they could have chosen a more auspicious name?
Some factors that count against them --
- The market's desire for eye candy and polish. Art costs money. Even if an artist is absolutely DRIVEN by the desire to create and doesn't really care about money -- a common contention on Slashdot -- he's still got to eat and pay rent. "Craft" and "FreeCiv" haven't exactly dethroned Blizzard's *craft or MicroProse/Firaxis's Civ* games yet, and part of the reason is that they're a hell of a lot less polished.
- Man-hours do count. Every piece of software could be improved, be it in interface, in stability, or what-not. Bigger houses can devote more programmers and more testers.
- The costs of marketing and distribution. It's harder to break into retail if you're unknown. Production and shipping costs may be higher, proportionally, for smaller runs.
For a niche market, like turn-based strongly historical, detailed wargames then certain considerations may go away. For instance, wargamers, usually being an older and less twitchy audience, don't seem to demand FMV intros or voice-overs. However, the RTS crowd may differ in its tastes...
Quantity. The number of people who write, act, sing, et al is far higher than those that do it well, and random sampling from a consumer's POV is going to take a bloody long time to find the worthwhile bits.
...and the court is absolutely required to be legally accurate. That's why this is the only way they could have ruled.
Bingo. It's not the judicial system's job to be sure Congress behaves nicely; it's only their job to make sure it acts legally. And when people, for the most part, vote for silly reasons such as party or charisma or how handsome a candidate looked during a debate (thank you, JFK for demonstrating the influence of physical appearance on politics -- the curious should look up the different reactions of people to the televised /and/ radio-broadcast Nixon-Kennedy debates), it's not the judicial system's job to fix that, either.
You're dead wrong. SCOTUS has no power to block the /stupid/, but merely the illegal. Punishing Congress for passing merely stupid (or even malicious), but perfectly legal, legislation is strictly the job of the voters. Care about it? Vote, and explain to others who don't care yet why you think they should.