If I had mod points I'd mod you up. Anyway, this is exactly right. Hilary Clinton's failed universal health care plan made more things illegal than the crime control bill of the same time. That's true socialism, not the goverment offering services, but making those services exclusive, and making it a crime to offer those services in a non-govermental way.
We should be able to offer everyone basic medicine without criminalizing private health care. Guess what? The rich will always get better care, so don't try to legislate that away.
If you leave a CD lying around, and someone walks by and steals it, they are guilty of theft. I don't see that you'd have any liability. If on the other hand, someone walked by and copied it, they are guilty of infringement, you also should be without liability.
If you loan a paperback book to a friend, that's ok. (Libraries do it all the time) If the friend copies the paperback, they are guilty of infringement, but I don't see any liability for you.
I'd say he has a good case, unless he intentionally put an electronic sign on his files, saying "Copy These Please!!!"
If time travel can be produced, it's worth (asymptotically) nearly any amount of investmemnt to get it.
Unfortunately, no. There are already experiments that seem to show time travel, but the nature of the experiment is that it takes longer to get the results, than the time distance you can travel backwards. i.e. I can send a message back 10 microseconds, but I don't know about it until 20 microseconds. The information isn't available until after the experiement is finished, rendering it useless.
These experiments become physics parlor tricks, like wavefronts moving greater than the speed of light, but they aren't useful.
If you could build a system that sent a small amount of information backwards in time, even only milliseconds, you could use it to build a computer that could run an infinite loop in constant time. Problems like traveling salesman could be solved with perfect induction.
Why couldn't it have been created 6000 years ago, but created *old*? With all the dinosaur fossils and everything intact?
Imagine everyone around are just simulations in a big computer. The creator could have run the simulation forward, stopped and tweaked it, and started it up again. The people inside the simulation wouldn't know that they've been messed with. Remember, an omniscient being could retroactively install a patch, and tweek everyone's memories so that they thought that that was the way it has always been.
Leader that talks with God. (Or *is* a god) --- Check
Leader that is determined by the high priests --- ???
Given the outcome of the Gore vs. Bush election, I not sure you're wrong. We'll have to wait for the 2008 election to be sure. When they announce the official religion and put an end to the popular vote, we will be firmly in a theocracy.
Robert Heinlein predicted that we'd be in a theocracy in his future history stories.
You're exactly right. An example I read was a health insurance company that said to clients, "We'll do everything possible to make you well." A non-lawyer would read this and think that really means everything, but to the lawyers at the insurance company, it meant they can avoid paying for experimental treatments because they are not covered by the word "possible."
Several readers hinted at the problem with payola, but didnt' get it right. The DJs that were sent to jail were taking money, without telling their respective radio stations. (or the listeners)
There are limits to the amount of advertising a radio/televison station can broadcast, but "What about infomercials?", you ask. Infomercials are allowed because one company bought an entire block of time and there's a disclaimer at the start. "The following is a paid..."
It would be perfectly ok for someone to buy an entire block of airtime, as long as it's disclosed, but it's not considered a cost effective way to sell music. People are much more inclined to like a new song they think it's being played because the DJ likes it than if the DJ is being paid to promote it.
Here's a game you can play in your car on the way to and from work. Try to tell when the DJ is saying something he was paid to say. It usually sounds scripted.
Re:This is what I HATE most about FOSS
on
GPLv2 Vs. GPLv3
·
· Score: 1
Check it out. I'll bet there are laws in your State that restaurants have to tell you the ingredients. Check out a bag of Doritos. It has a list of ingredients in decending order of proportion. People with food allergies do have a right to know what's in their food, because it's a life or dead situation. I don't think any restaurant worth it's salt would refuse to tell you if a meal has been baked/fried/whatever. Put that together with the ingredients, and you have a pretty good start at duplicating the meal yourself.
Just writing any software using VS Express is working around "technical limitations". Any language is technically limited from doing much of anything useful until someone actually writes a program in it. Why is writting a plug-in for it any different than writing "Hello World?"
If a language didn't have a sort routine built-in and you used it to write a sort routine, would you be guilty of working around "techinical limitations?" If program X is too slow written in VS Express and you find a way to make it run faster (perhaps by writing it in C ), have you worked around "techinical limitations?" Since when was this a bad thing?
In the past, when Microsoft didn't want something to work, like say, Lotus 123, they would release an upgrade that would run all their stuff, but not Lotus 123.
What's stopping them from doing the same here? Can't they just release a new upgraded version of Visual Studio Express that won't run his stuff?
Wow, that would be workable if it was like a three strikes thing. The first two times it happened (in one term) the lawmaker would have to sit out the next three votes. After the third, he's outta there. The count could reset with each term. To sweeten the pot, any legislator who was ousted would lose the right to run for office or vote for awhile, and have a large 'U' branded/tattooed on their forehead.
You could extend this idea to DA's that abuse their power in unconstitutional ways.
Once the police get wind of your potential crime, all they have to do is come knocking every month or so, and watch your computer burn. (Have A Nice Day) After about 6 months of this, you'll be spending more on computer equipment than you are earning by doing crime.
Also, the big boss that you report to will want to know where his money is. If the keys to the offshore accounts are on the machine that was slagged down, what are you going to tell him? "I lost your $25 million so I wouldn't go to jail?" The boss will tell you that you and he would have rather seen you go to jail, I'm sorry but I'm going to have to work you over.
This kind of thing is ok for the spy agencies that tend to bug out when trouble hits, but for the regular criminal that needs his data, it's not too workable.
Like Ford, Chrysler, and Cheverolet. AT&T, Verizon, and MCI. NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX. Yes, companies like Nash, and UPN died or were bought and merged away but most markets have room for more than one player. Apple actually licensed and then killed it's clone market. IBM just stopped sueing theirs, but misstepped when it tried to take the market away by selling the closed archetecture in the PS/2.
You're right in that Steve probably would have misstepped agained the Bill, but it wasn't guarenteed.
I used a few a few years back and I STILL get a phone call 3 or 4x a month...
Wow, since you're in that much demand, I'd start raising my rates until they either stop calling, or they make you an offer you can't refuse. This actually worked for a friend of my dad's that worked for the goverment. When he was recruited, he jokingly named a figure that was about 2x the salary he was currently getting. When they countered with an offer of 1.8x of his current salary, he jumped.
For 2 week jobs, you'll have to phrase it like, "I require a $20,000 signing bonus, $500/hour, 200 hour minimum." If they bite, take 2 weeks of leave from your current company, and laugh to the bank.
In a letter to Jobs, Gates even layed out his strategy and suggested Steve adopt it as well. Make your OS run on as many platforms as possible, and team with hardware manufacturures to make it pre-installed. Then leverage your OS to make big money on the applications. Bill followed his own advice, Steve didn't. Now Bill's a deca-billionaire, and Steve's just a billionaire. C'est L'vie
Note that we went the entire cold war with just protocol and encryption keys keeping someone from hijacking our nuclear arsenal.
The space shuttle and every space launch we're sent into space can be detonated remotely. So far no one's been able to break the system. (and at least on some unmanned flights, it's been used properly)
What is it with you constitution lovers? Did this one document completely remove your brain's ability to have a rational argument? Ever heard of amendments to this fine document? If it's so perfect, why have there been 27 amendments to it (so far)? The world changes, and law needs to change to embrace these changes.
Be careful of what you ask for. This simple amendment to that fine document led to the quagmire we call the IRS.
Amendment 16 - Status of Income Tax Clarified. Ratified 2/3/1913. Note History
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
Still want to go in and add a simple amendment? In the US, there are something like 7000 different sales tax configuations. (State, country, city, town, etc.) It would be literally impossible for a small business to keep track of all them. They would have to hire someone or some firm to do it for them increasing cost, and driving some out of business.
"When you buy something online you pay the same tax as you would if you had bought it in your state"
Where in your state? Your shipping address or your billing address. If my parents live in the county and aren't subject to city taxes, can I have everything shipped to them and avoid some tax? What if I have a P.O. box for both shipping and billing, but live in one tax zone, and work in another?
Simply banning all taxes on imports keeps things much simpler. Another simple, legal system would be a Federal sales tax on all shipments. Everyone pays the same rate, and the rate is easy to compute. The states would get their share based on the IRS recorded legal residence.
I knew a guy that could look once at the words to a song (in a hymnal) and then he could sing that song perfectly. He had photographic memory for songs, and total recall. I knew another guy who had 1/2 the Berkeley kernel memorized. I imagine that by now he's got almost all of it available for recall.
In the future, genetically enhanced kids will have complete recall of every movie they ever saw, and don't need to go back to the theater. They will just be able to sit by themselves and remember it.
How will things be then? Will these people be banned from bookstores and libraries? Will broadcast TV be gone by then? Will they have to report regularly to **AA "Memory Erasure" stations?
Backups... how many backups should be allowed? One? Three? Ulimited?
If the original is stolen, can you sell the backup?
Can a lending library make backups of everything, then only let patrons check out the copies. If a copy isn't returned, or is damaged, can they let someone else check out another copy.
If they can't lend out copies, what if the original is destroyed. Can the library now lend out the copy?
In the old days, free lending libraries were only a minor threat to the publishers because they paid for their stuff, and stuff wore out. Now that there's free stuff and stuff doesn't have to wear out, the lending library becomes more of a threat. I get DVD movies from our local library. They already have a better selection than the rental places, I can check things out for 2 weeks, and it's free. (The late fees are minimal as well) If I buy a movie these days, it's much more likely that I'm buying a used copy at a yard sale or over the internet. I haven't bought a new CD in over 7 years.
someone remind me again what language Unix was written in?
Assembly. Then it was re-written in C. 25 years ago, (1982) I was just getting into UNIX, BSD on a VAX, and it was C, with the tightest loops in the kernel still in assembly. Remember you use to be able to put assembler code inline in with your C code and it was trivial to link a C module with any other object module. I think that's one of the biggest arguments for C (and UNIX) for that matter, it works and plays well with others. Other languages like APL and Smalltalk want to be their own environment, making it difficult to interface with other languages.
If it's really a "use tax", then why don't you pay it on things that you purchase in-state and "use" in that state? i.e. why isn't it applied to stuff that you've paid sales tax on. (I know that's the way the law was written, but what's the logic?)
Calling it a "use" tax is just an end-run around the constitution. It's not the first time, and not the last that government will do this.
It's also logical to argue that there should be exactly one, across the board, tax. i.e. only Federal income tax, or a Federal sales tax, and all public expeditures should come from that.
Taxes are an economic optimization. If you were charged a toll for every road you took, it would be very expensive and inefficient to get anywhere. It's much like a subscription to a magazine. It's cheaper to buy a year at a time, than to have to individually pay for each issue.
You're right that the reason we have so many complicated taxes is control. The states want to control how much alcohol and tobacco people use, so the tax them. They want people to buy houses, so they give some money back to people who buy rather than rent. If they treated taxes as a simple money grab, they'd be a lot more efficient.
One system a friend of mine came up with was to simply apply an across the board Federal sales tax. (a regressive tax). Then give everyone a rebate of whatevery the current poverty level was plus $1, and thus, no more poverty. He did the computations for the year he came up with the idea, and figured the new system would actually put more money into the Treasury than the current system, while costing people less.
Slashdot Mirror
If I had mod points I'd mod you up. Anyway, this is exactly right. Hilary Clinton's failed universal health care plan made more things illegal than the crime control bill of the same time. That's true socialism, not the goverment offering services, but making those services exclusive, and making it a crime to offer those services in a non-govermental way.
We should be able to offer everyone basic medicine without criminalizing private health care. Guess what? The rich will always get better care, so don't try to legislate that away.
If you leave a CD lying around, and someone walks by and steals it, they are guilty of theft. I don't see that you'd have any liability. If on the other hand, someone walked by and copied it, they are guilty of infringement, you also should be without liability.
If you loan a paperback book to a friend, that's ok. (Libraries do it all the time) If the friend copies the paperback, they are guilty of infringement, but I don't see any liability for you.
I'd say he has a good case, unless he intentionally put an electronic sign on his files, saying "Copy These Please!!!"
So if he had yelled at the Police, "You are being recorded", and ignored their request to stop, he would have been ok?
These experiments become physics parlor tricks, like wavefronts moving greater than the speed of light, but they aren't useful.
If you could build a system that sent a small amount of information backwards in time, even only milliseconds, you could use it to build a computer that could run an infinite loop in constant time. Problems like traveling salesman could be solved with perfect induction.
Why couldn't it have been created 6000 years ago, but created *old*? With all the dinosaur fossils and everything intact?
Imagine everyone around are just simulations in a big computer. The creator could have run the simulation forward, stopped and tweaked it, and started it up again. The people inside the simulation wouldn't know that they've been messed with. Remember, an omniscient being could retroactively install a patch, and tweek everyone's memories so that they thought that that was the way it has always been.
Theocracy:
- Leader that talks with God. (Or *is* a god) --- Check
- Leader that is determined by the high priests --- ???
Given the outcome of the Gore vs. Bush election, I not sure you're wrong. We'll have to wait for the 2008 election to be sure. When they announce the official religion and put an end to the popular vote, we will be firmly in a theocracy.Robert Heinlein predicted that we'd be in a theocracy in his future history stories.
You're exactly right. An example I read was a health insurance company that said to clients, "We'll do everything possible to make you well." A non-lawyer would read this and think that really means everything, but to the lawyers at the insurance company, it meant they can avoid paying for experimental treatments because they are not covered by the word "possible."
Several readers hinted at the problem with payola, but didnt' get it right. The DJs that were sent to jail were taking money, without telling their respective radio stations. (or the listeners)
There are limits to the amount of advertising a radio/televison station can broadcast, but "What about infomercials?", you ask. Infomercials are allowed because one company bought an entire block of time and there's a disclaimer at the start. "The following is a paid..."
It would be perfectly ok for someone to buy an entire block of airtime, as long as it's disclosed, but it's not considered a cost effective way to sell music. People are much more inclined to like a new song they think it's being played because the DJ likes it than if the DJ is being paid to promote it.
Here's a game you can play in your car on the way to and from work. Try to tell when the DJ is saying something he was paid to say. It usually sounds scripted.
Check it out. I'll bet there are laws in your State that restaurants have to tell you the ingredients. Check out a bag of Doritos. It has a list of ingredients in decending order of proportion. People with food allergies do have a right to know what's in their food, because it's a life or dead situation. I don't think any restaurant worth it's salt would refuse to tell you if a meal has been baked/fried/whatever. Put that together with the ingredients, and you have a pretty good start at duplicating the meal yourself.
Your Tivo knows which parts you've fast forwarded through, and which parts you have repeated. All this info is sent back to the mother ship.
Just writing any software using VS Express is working around "technical limitations". Any language is technically limited from doing much of anything useful until someone actually writes a program in it. Why is writting a plug-in for it any different than writing "Hello World?"
If a language didn't have a sort routine built-in and you used it to write a sort routine, would you be guilty of working around "techinical limitations?" If program X is too slow written in VS Express and you find a way to make it run faster (perhaps by writing it in C ), have you worked around "techinical limitations?" Since when was this a bad thing?
In the past, when Microsoft didn't want something to work, like say, Lotus 123, they would release an upgrade that would run all their stuff, but not Lotus 123.
What's stopping them from doing the same here? Can't they just release a new upgraded version of Visual Studio Express that won't run his stuff?
Wow, that would be workable if it was like a three strikes thing. The first two times it happened (in one term) the lawmaker would have to sit out the next three votes. After the third, he's outta there. The count could reset with each term. To sweeten the pot, any legislator who was ousted would lose the right to run for office or vote for awhile, and have a large 'U' branded/tattooed on their forehead.
You could extend this idea to DA's that abuse their power in unconstitutional ways.
Once the police get wind of your potential crime, all they have to do is come knocking every month or so, and watch your computer burn. (Have A Nice Day) After about 6 months of this, you'll be spending more on computer equipment than you are earning by doing crime.
Also, the big boss that you report to will want to know where his money is. If the keys to the offshore accounts are on the machine that was slagged down, what are you going to tell him? "I lost your $25 million so I wouldn't go to jail?" The boss will tell you that you and he would have rather seen you go to jail, I'm sorry but I'm going to have to work you over.
This kind of thing is ok for the spy agencies that tend to bug out when trouble hits, but for the regular criminal that needs his data, it's not too workable.
Like Ford, Chrysler, and Cheverolet. AT&T, Verizon, and MCI. NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX. Yes, companies like Nash, and UPN died or were bought and merged away but most markets have room for more than one player. Apple actually licensed and then killed it's clone market. IBM just stopped sueing theirs, but misstepped when it tried to take the market away by selling the closed archetecture in the PS/2.
You're right in that Steve probably would have misstepped agained the Bill, but it wasn't guarenteed.
For 2 week jobs, you'll have to phrase it like, "I require a $20,000 signing bonus, $500/hour, 200 hour minimum." If they bite, take 2 weeks of leave from your current company, and laugh to the bank.
In a letter to Jobs, Gates even layed out his strategy and suggested Steve adopt it as well. Make your OS run on as many platforms as possible, and team with hardware manufacturures to make it pre-installed. Then leverage your OS to make big money on the applications. Bill followed his own advice, Steve didn't. Now Bill's a deca-billionaire, and Steve's just a billionaire. C'est L'vie
Note that we went the entire cold war with just protocol and encryption keys keeping someone from hijacking our nuclear arsenal.
The space shuttle and every space launch we're sent into space can be detonated remotely. So far no one's been able to break the system. (and at least on some unmanned flights, it's been used properly)
Simply banning all taxes on imports keeps things much simpler. Another simple, legal system would be a Federal sales tax on all shipments. Everyone pays the same rate, and the rate is easy to compute. The states would get their share based on the IRS recorded legal residence.
I knew a guy that could look once at the words to a song (in a hymnal) and then he could sing that song perfectly. He had photographic memory for songs, and total recall. I knew another guy who had 1/2 the Berkeley kernel memorized. I imagine that by now he's got almost all of it available for recall.
In the future, genetically enhanced kids will have complete recall of every movie they ever saw, and don't need to go back to the theater. They will just be able to sit by themselves and remember it.
How will things be then? Will these people be banned from bookstores and libraries? Will broadcast TV be gone by then? Will they have to report regularly to **AA "Memory Erasure" stations?
- If the original is stolen, can you sell the backup?
- Can a lending library make backups of everything, then only let patrons check out the copies. If a copy isn't returned, or is damaged, can they let someone else check out another copy.
- If they can't lend out copies, what if the original is destroyed. Can the library now lend out the copy?
In the old days, free lending libraries were only a minor threat to the publishers because they paid for their stuff, and stuff wore out. Now that there's free stuff and stuff doesn't have to wear out, the lending library becomes more of a threat. I get DVD movies from our local library. They already have a better selection than the rental places, I can check things out for 2 weeks, and it's free. (The late fees are minimal as well) If I buy a movie these days, it's much more likely that I'm buying a used copy at a yard sale or over the internet. I haven't bought a new CD in over 7 years.If it's really a "use tax", then why don't you pay it on things that you purchase in-state and "use" in that state? i.e. why isn't it applied to stuff that you've paid sales tax on. (I know that's the way the law was written, but what's the logic?)
Calling it a "use" tax is just an end-run around the constitution. It's not the first time, and not the last that government will do this.
It's also logical to argue that there should be exactly one, across the board, tax. i.e. only Federal income tax, or a Federal sales tax, and all public expeditures should come from that.
Taxes are an economic optimization. If you were charged a toll for every road you took, it would be very expensive and inefficient to get anywhere. It's much like a subscription to a magazine. It's cheaper to buy a year at a time, than to have to individually pay for each issue.
You're right that the reason we have so many complicated taxes is control. The states want to control how much alcohol and tobacco people use, so the tax them. They want people to buy houses, so they give some money back to people who buy rather than rent. If they treated taxes as a simple money grab, they'd be a lot more efficient.
One system a friend of mine came up with was to simply apply an across the board Federal sales tax. (a regressive tax). Then give everyone a rebate of whatevery the current poverty level was plus $1, and thus, no more poverty. He did the computations for the year he came up with the idea, and figured the new system would actually put more money into the Treasury than the current system, while costing people less.