Obviously hiring a security force would require funds. The payment isn't a tax, however, unless the "security force" is the one threatening me. That's the difference between a private defense organization and a government; the government threatens you directly if you don't pay, without any prior agreement, whereas the private security force is (a) offering to protect against external threats, and (b) only demands payment in accordance with a prior defense contract you voluntarily accepted which specified in advance, among other things, the amount to be paid for the service.
You do realize, of course, that such a security force is going to force your rules on someone - namely those "external threats" you mentioned - since otherwise it isn't going to do you any good ? You could claim that you never initiate force, only defend yourself; and that works fine until the first time there's a dispute over the ownership some piece of property. At that point, if you use your security force to enforce your claim to it, you are - from the other sides point of view - taking their property by force; in other words, stealing. And if that other guy also has a security force, and is unwilling to give up his claim, you have a war on your hands.
That's why there needs to be an impartial (as much as possible; complete objectivity is likely impossible for human beings) third party to rule on such issues. That party also must have sufficient force at its disposal to enforce its decisions, or it will simply be ignored by the lost side. The government claims monopoly on violence because the other choice is constant war; not because people are evil, but because you get situations where both sides think they're correct and neither is going to back up unles forced to.
Besides, while you may be moral enough not to use your security force to raid your neighbours food supplies even if you are facing starvation yourself, not everyone is as nice, and even a saint may be tempted if his children are starving. Those private security forces are easily turned into raiding parties, and there are no guarantees that the agreement with them stays voluntary - after all, without a government which can enforce contracts by force, just what are you going to do if your security force decides to alter the deal Darth Vader style ?
Sure, by definition government predates law. Irrelevant, however, as the principles behind property rights -- homesteading (initial ownership by first user) and voluntary exchange, and their opposites, theft and trespass -- also predate law.
No they don't. Sure, before the governments you could claim any piece of land as your own, but you had no right to it - anyone stronger than you could kick you out of it, and you had no recourse, except perhaps get your friends to help kick him out; in other words, "might makes right". It is the government which grants you a right to some piece of land and, if neccessary, backs that claim with overwhelming force. The same goes for all other possessions: without a government, they're only yours until someone stronger wants them.
The trend throughout history is toward more-absolute property rights, not less. It's hardly an accident that those countries with the strongest respect for property rights, and particularly those based on the system of common law, are the ones with the highest standards of living and visa-versa.
Those countries are also the ones with a strong central government, capable of crushing all opposition and enforcing its rules, property rights amongst others. Is that a coincidence, then ?
What I am opposed to the the use of aggression (initiation of coercion/force/violence). As far as I'm concerned "government" is any organization which claims the authority to employ aggression, which obviously i
If I refuse, they pay guys with guns to kidnap me and hold me without just cause, and increase the amount demanded.
Yes; it is indeed a pity that you don't have a government to protect you from such criminals. But of course if you did, it would require funds to hire a police force to stop these criminals, and would likely end up taxing you to rise those funds; and then you would complain on Slashdot of how you are being billed for services you never requested.
Property rights predate government in general, and were present in the common law and privately enforced long before the United States was founded.
Government predates law. The earliest societies were ruled by the entirely arbitrary decisions of their governments, be those governments single dictators, tribal councils, or whatever. The rule of law was only introduced when society had grown to the point where the ruler couldn't oversee everything personally, and needed to delegate some of the task to his underlings.
Besides, if you have sufficient power to enforce your rules - be their property laws or anything else - on others, and do so, just how are you not a government ? Government is simply whoever has the final say in the matters, after all. This seems to be something various anti-government people fail to realize, at least judging from what they post here on Slashdot.
Government does presently enforce property rights (when it's convenient for them to do so), but only because they actively prevent others from fulfilling that role. Property rights do not originate with or depend on the government.
Property rights, as well as all other rights, originate with someone who is both capable and willing to uphold and enforce them against whoever tries to violate them. It is customary to call that someone "government".
And we have plenty of private organizations trying to enforce their own set of rules; the Mafia, for example.
The problems with Comparables usually come about because of a failure to implement Comparable instead of just implement Comparable. Java typically won't tell you that's the problem, it will steer you off into some other wild goose chase, but if you implement Comparable the challenges typically disappear.
I love the irony of how a text about Java generics seems to have lost some information between the source and compiled states, therefore leading to much confusion:).
Will I get a ClassCastException if I guess you were talking about the difference between Comparable and Comparable<T> ?-)
It's true that you could save an extra array initialization. On the other hand, if another thread adds one more element in between the call to size() and the call to toArray(), that could cost an initialization of a large amount of memory. There's no overall "best" way to write the code; I showed the simplest and the one with the least risk of wasting time
So preallocate an array with size 1, and let the next minor garbage collection cycle deal with it. Problem solved:). Or just synchronize on the vector:
You're a soldier. You're ordered to turn your weapons on your friends, cousins, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers.
No. You're ordered to turn your weapons on total strangers living in another side of the country, who you're told have decided to kill your friends, cousins etc. Meanwhile the soldiers from the other side of the country are told to turn their weapons to your friends, uncles etc. who they're told have decided to kill their friends, uncles etc. Then you let both troops know of the atrocities the other is committing, and there you have it: a merciless foreign occupation force.
I've missed my true calling as an evil overlord, or a President of the United States:).
Most people in Asia,, believe it or not, prefer to be called Asians, the conflict in "the Middle East" is referred as the "West Asia" conflict in Asian countries.
I find it hard to believe that most people in Asia give a damn whether people half the world away call them "Easterners" or "Asians", since I know I don't give damn if they call me "European" or "Westerner". Do you have any kind of evidence to back up your claim ?
There are a lot of movies made that absolutely fucking suck and I don't want tax dollars going towards subsidizing that.
But they already are. Or do you think that the policemen raided the Pirate Bay for free ? No, enforcing copyrights costs a lot.
That said, the original premise of "movies can't be performed live" is completely false. Movies can certainly be performed "live": in a movie theater. The theater has resources a private individual can't get due to expenses (big screen and good sound system), and the manager and the movie producer are certainly free to make a contract that keeps the manager from simply copying the film reel to other threaters; the audience may copy, but that doesn't matter, since they still won't have equivalent home theaters.
But anyway, if the movie industry really can't survive without government subsidizies in the form of an artificial monopolies like copyright, perhaps it should curl up and die ? With computers becoming more and more powerful and electronic (video) cameras becoming cheaper, making movies yourself is slowly becoming a real possibility. Are the big studios really needed anymore ? Bad enough to justify copyrights ?
I'll let that sink in: Sony made the DVD players, and Sony made the DVDs. The DVDs do NOT work in the DVD players.
But I understood that other DVDs work perfectly fine in these DVD players ? And these "copy-protected" DVDs fail in other players too ?
That's why I assumed that it's the DVD and not DVD player which is the problem here. That they are made by the same company is indeed ironic, and speaks volumes of Sony's quality controls, but it still makes Sony DVDs, not Sony DVD players, defective. Sony players are just low-quality, being unable to deal with defective DVDs, not outright defective:).
Let's say Ford owns my local gas station. Let's say they try to fuel me up with, say, hydrogen, because we're all supposed to be driving fuel-cell cars by now -- in fact, it's not just my car, but they've replaced ALL their pumps with hydrogen. And they tell me that I should have gotten an upgrade, should have replaced my internal combustion engine with a fuel cell and an electric motor.
So, of course, I ask them where I can get an upgrade. They tell me they don't have any working fuel cells, and, in fact, no one does, at least not for my car.
So tell me how this is not Ford's fault, again? Or, how is this not Sony's fault?
Of course it's Ford's fault. However, your car (DVD player) is perfectly fine; it's the fuel (Sony DVDs) which is the problem. Not that that really matters, I guess.
Retailer return policies are for one-off problems, not for class issues. A court of law is the proper resolution of this issue, and not abuse of customer service policies.
Abuse ? Returning a defective DVD is exercising your legal right to demand that the store fullfills its end of the contract of sale which assigned the ownership of the DVD to you in exchange of money in the first place. The store failed their end - they gave you a product which doesn't work as promised - but you are graciously giving them a chance to fix their error before suing them, since you believe they made it in good faith rather than as a deliberate attempt to defraud you. How is that abuse ?
You can't return a bottle of Advil because it didn't get rid of your headache--but if you have reason to believe there's something wrong with the Advil, you can certainly take that up with the pharmaceutical company.
It is impossible to prove that something didn't get rid of your headache. It is trivial to demonstrate that these "DVDs" don't work as promised by simply putting them into a DVD player and atttempting to play them. Your example is defective:).
The discs work as designed. They don't work as advertised (being that they are labeled DVDs), but retailers are not responsible for the claims made on the packaging of products they sell.
Of course they are. They may avoid charges of fraud if they acted on good faith, thinking that the advertizing was correct and not being able to check the truth of this without opening the package for example, but they most certainly are required to either replace the defective product with a new one or give the customers money back.
Where on Earth did you get the idea that you can be not responsible for a sale you made ? Or that intentionally selling defective products would make you less responsible than doing it by accident ?
Your ability to return a defective DVD is intended solely to allow for the replacement of manufacturing errors.
Your ability to return a defective DVD is firmly rooted in consumer protection laws as well as contractual laws. It is not a gracious courtesy from the stores part, but a legal obligation underlaying the whole economy: you must deliver what you promised, or dissolve the contract, refunding any already made payments.
It's exactly the same thing that causes you to lose your house or car if you fail to make the payments in time; only this time it's working for you.
Otherwise, you could buy and rip all of your DVDs and then return them because "they don't work on my Linux computer." No one has ever found that DVDs *must* play under Linux.
Apart from the fact that I've never encountered a DVD which wouldn't play on Linux (using Xine), I think the court - even US court - might find the argument that DVDs sold as video DVDs don't have to play on DVD players strange when the whole purpose of a video DVD is to be played on DVD player.
This absolutely is an advertising issue along with an implied warranty of fitness issue. But the retail customer service remedy is not the correct one. It's the easiest way for customers to get their money back, but it merely treats the symptoms and harms an uninvolved third party.
Retail store is neither uninvolved nor a third party. It sold you the defective DVD; it is responsible of fullfilling its end of that contract by delivering you a non-defective DVD or, if that should turn out to be impossible (as is likely since all the DVDs of this batch seem to be defective), dissolving the contract and giving you your money back. The store can then take the issue up with whoever sold the DVD to them, and get their money back.
This is a case where there needs to be a recall. No fucking firmware update, you take their DVD players back, and you give them their money back.
Why should the DVD player makers take the DVD players back ? They work perfectly, after all; it's not their fault that Sony releases disks containing malformed data. It's Sony's phony DVD's that should be recalled.
To continue the car analogies: if your local service station decides to fill the gas pumps with tap water to "prevent criminal use of the car" or some nonsense like that, should your cars manufacturer recall the car when it fails to work with a tank full of water ?
The "in the future" issue is not about the GPL, it is an issue with law, i.e. you can't change the rules in the middle of the game.
Unless you write an EULA, in which case you can change the terms of sale after the sale (or licensing or whatever you actually get from a software store).
As long as I don't violate copyright law, there isn't too much all 100 million of MS's lawyers can do about it.
Except sue you anyway, and keep the case going long enough that the cost of defending yourself drives you banckrupt. After all, you are no IBM, and MS is no SCO. Of course MS isn't likely to care enough to crush you like a grape, but if it wants to, it can.
A mere mortal like yourself has about as much of a chance of victory against corporations as old Greek heros of myth had against Greek gods. Best you can hope for is that you won't be paid any attention; but drawing it to yourself risks getting your proverbial liver torn to bits by birds. Or non-proverbial, if the corporation in question happens to have connection to the Russian underworld (or the Greek one;)...
Coming to think of it, I really like the thought of corporations as modern-day equivalent of Greek gods: powerful, immortal, and not really held to any moral or legal standards. Gods of Capitalism, so to say. But what would that make Fiscal Quarter - a single era in cyclical time ?-)
Yes, it's vulnerable to a 'hivemind' of moderation, where certain types of comments always get modded up, and others down
The whole purpose of a moderation system is to moderate certain kind of comments up and others down. A moderation system which doesn't achieve this would be modding comments randomly, not based on their contents, since otherwise there would emerge a pattern of certain kinds of comments getting modded up and other kinds down.
Are for books and movies.. In the real world the only law is to win. You cant come in 2nd in a war.
While that certainly sounds tough, it doesn't help the guy who has to program the robot any. "Victory" is nowhere near well-defined concept to express in any programming language, being entirely dependent on both the situation (both military and political) and the particular person being asked. You need to define the rules of behavior the robot should follow in order to program it; after all, you can't program if you don't know what the program is supposed to do.
Besides, it's certainly possible to come in 2nd in a war or a battle. For example, Finland lost Winter and Continuation Wars against Soviet Russia, but managed to avoid Soviet occupation. Another good example is the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk during WW2; while retreat is hardly a victory, it allowed the British army to stay functional and eventually win.
And conversely, following the doctrine of "victory at any cost" is sure to cause a huge backslash of public opinion due to the atrocities it will surely lead.
Then sit back and wait. Wait for the students to put this together and realize that they don't have to put up with your censorship shit.
Or wait for the students to put this together and realize that their "rights" are just so many empty words, and don't actually have any weight or power whatsoever, and the people who died for them died for nothing. That is a lesson which will help them for the rest of their lives. "Know your place, shut your face; the nail that sticks out gets hammered down."
Conformity is neccessary for the society to hold together, and society funds schools for its own good.
anyone without a criminal record should be able to purchase and carry firearms at will without permits or oversight.
I have to take an issue on your qualifier "without a criminal record". As I see it, if someone with a criminal record wants to purchase firearms, and can't legally do it, there are two possibilities:
He is going to commit another crime, in which case he will be able to obtain firearms anyway, the same way teens get booze (pay someone who can get them to buy them for them). In this case the limitation doesn't help any.
He isn't going to commit another crime, in which case the limitation essentially continues his punishment forever; he is permanently reduced to a second-rate citizen. This is unfair; a lifelong punishment for minor crimes is not just, especially since anything can be made to be a crime.
For these reasons I think that gun ownership should either be unregulated or regulated, but not halfway regulated. The same goes to pretty much everything.
Anyone with a bit of patriotism and American sprit left in them should VOTE LIBERTARIAN!
Why ? Isn't their agenda removing the remaining limitations from total contractual freedom, allowing Corporate America to use its vastly superior resources to force even more onerous demands on the people who have to deal with it ?
Libertarians seem to think that removing state power makes people free. It does not, it simply creates a power vacuum for someone else to fill. The large corporations seem most likely, already practically controlling most countries, but even if they fail to seize power someone else won't; no matter what, you will always have an overlord, and in the end, despite their numerous flaws the current semi-democratical Western states are amongst the most benevolent overlords in human history.
All of this, of course, assumes that the libertarians will actually keep their word if elected, which would require them to be resistant to the temptation of power. Given history of politics, that seems a rather generous assumption.
It seems that the code that generates the next ObjectID is smart enough to skip IDs that have been assigned; hacks that reset the ObjectID counter back to FF000000 appear to do the right thing. If the counter had no prefix, the bug wouldn't affect the game - the counter would roll over, but any objects that had been around since the start of the game (with low ObjectIDs) would be properly skipped and all would be well. Unless you managed to have FFFFFFFF objects extant in the game world, there'd never be a way to run out.
Or you they just make getNextObjectID() roll over at the proper place: "if objectID == FFEEEEEE Then objectID = FF000000 Else objectID = objectID + 1; return objectID".
Then again, after seeing Morrowinds "let's run all the scripts once every frame and let each of them check if the user is activating the object this script actually applies to" approach, I can't say I'm the least bit surprised. Event-driven code is sooo 2000.
Don't forget the wooden stake. That's the most important part, because they'll just rise from the grave if you don't. Although maybe exposure in full sunshine will do them in too, I never remember which remedy works best on which kind of monster.
Drive a wooden stake through whatever passes as the heart, cut off the head, stuff the mouth full of garlic, burn the remains, expose the ashes to direct sunshine for at least three hours, sprinkle them with holy water, bury them in consecrated ground and build a crossing of 8 highways right on top of them. Then have the pope perform funeral rites there, and finally nuke the whole place from orbit.
These sad souls need guidance, rehab, a life, something outside the warm cocoon of fat rolls and 3d dwarf landscapes.
Without commenting on your arrogant assertion that you know how someone else should live their live, this rises up a rather interesting point: why does the Chinese government want children to spend their time in reality rather than virtual reality ? After all, people playing WoW are far less likely to demand freedom or engage in other activities antithethical to the Chinese political system than people spending their time speaking with each other and perhaps coming up with dangerous ideas lie freedom from censorship. Warm cocoon makes people drowsy, cold reality shocks them wide awake. The former makes it far easier for the Chinese government to stay in power than the latter.
Is this a case of a tyrant starting to believe his own lies about his benevolence, or does the Chinese government just have absolute confidence in their iron fist ?
Excuse me for not giving out such details on a public forum, I think that would not be proper.
No one is accusing you of that. Leave the straw men out of this.
Everything else in my comment can be counted for an opinion. So in my opinion, which is based on understanding of the situation due to my relationship with the best friend of the deceased, the guy is guilty. There is nothing improper about stating an opinion.
Maybe you have good reason to think he's guilty, or maybe you just hate his guts and want to turn public opinion against him, in hopes of making it more likely he's convicted (judges and jury's are just human, in the end) or giving him hell in case he's found innocent, or maybe you're just wrong. Since you didn't show your evidence, it can't be reviewed and its merits analyzed, so there's no way to counter or confirm your claims, making them essentially equivalent to FUD.
In other words, you're spreading rumors and harming Reiser's reputation, and doing it in a way that makes it impossible for him to defend himself even if he's in fact not guilty. That is not proper. To further illustrate the point, let's take a hypothetical post about you:
I'm a friend of a sister of a parent of a 10-year-old kid roman_mir molested. Now, I won't post evidence for this online, of course, since it isn't proper, but I'm 99% certain that roman_mir is a pedophile and has raped little girls.
Imagine your real name appearing on the above paragraph, where any search engine will forever after pick up the pedophilia accusation in association with your name, and think long and hard of the possible consequences, especially if you ever actually are accused of such a crime before a court; do you see the problem of posting this kind of opinions online in the way you did ?
In short: if you can't or won't post the evidence for your accusations of serious crimes, don't post the accusations either. And yes, "I know the case, and am 99% certain he's guilty" (emphasis mine) is an accusation.
Anyway, you either get the point or you won't, and agree or won't; either way, I've explained and argued for it as clearly as I can, and will not reply anymore, since that would be just rehashing the same argument and therefore a waste of time.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize, of course, that such a security force is going to force your rules on someone - namely those "external threats" you mentioned - since otherwise it isn't going to do you any good ? You could claim that you never initiate force, only defend yourself; and that works fine until the first time there's a dispute over the ownership some piece of property. At that point, if you use your security force to enforce your claim to it, you are - from the other sides point of view - taking their property by force; in other words, stealing. And if that other guy also has a security force, and is unwilling to give up his claim, you have a war on your hands.
That's why there needs to be an impartial (as much as possible; complete objectivity is likely impossible for human beings) third party to rule on such issues. That party also must have sufficient force at its disposal to enforce its decisions, or it will simply be ignored by the lost side. The government claims monopoly on violence because the other choice is constant war; not because people are evil, but because you get situations where both sides think they're correct and neither is going to back up unles forced to.
Besides, while you may be moral enough not to use your security force to raid your neighbours food supplies even if you are facing starvation yourself, not everyone is as nice, and even a saint may be tempted if his children are starving. Those private security forces are easily turned into raiding parties, and there are no guarantees that the agreement with them stays voluntary - after all, without a government which can enforce contracts by force, just what are you going to do if your security force decides to alter the deal Darth Vader style ?
No they don't. Sure, before the governments you could claim any piece of land as your own, but you had no right to it - anyone stronger than you could kick you out of it, and you had no recourse, except perhaps get your friends to help kick him out; in other words, "might makes right". It is the government which grants you a right to some piece of land and, if neccessary, backs that claim with overwhelming force. The same goes for all other possessions: without a government, they're only yours until someone stronger wants them.
Those countries are also the ones with a strong central government, capable of crushing all opposition and enforcing its rules, property rights amongst others. Is that a coincidence, then ?
Yes; it is indeed a pity that you don't have a government to protect you from such criminals. But of course if you did, it would require funds to hire a police force to stop these criminals, and would likely end up taxing you to rise those funds; and then you would complain on Slashdot of how you are being billed for services you never requested.
Government predates law. The earliest societies were ruled by the entirely arbitrary decisions of their governments, be those governments single dictators, tribal councils, or whatever. The rule of law was only introduced when society had grown to the point where the ruler couldn't oversee everything personally, and needed to delegate some of the task to his underlings.
Besides, if you have sufficient power to enforce your rules - be their property laws or anything else - on others, and do so, just how are you not a government ? Government is simply whoever has the final say in the matters, after all. This seems to be something various anti-government people fail to realize, at least judging from what they post here on Slashdot.
Property rights, as well as all other rights, originate with someone who is both capable and willing to uphold and enforce them against whoever tries to violate them. It is customary to call that someone "government".
And we have plenty of private organizations trying to enforce their own set of rules; the Mafia, for example.
The Supreme Being of Cthulhuverse is Azathoth. Cthulhu is just a priest, and a slothful one at that :).
I love the irony of how a text about Java generics seems to have lost some information between the source and compiled states, therefore leading to much confusion :).
Will I get a ClassCastException if I guess you were talking about the difference between Comparable and Comparable<T> ?-)
So preallocate an array with size 1, and let the next minor garbage collection cycle deal with it. Problem solved :). Or just synchronize on the vector:
synchronized(vec) { SomeClass myarray[] = new SomeClass[vec.size()]; myarray = vec.toArray(myarray); }
No. You're ordered to turn your weapons on total strangers living in another side of the country, who you're told have decided to kill your friends, cousins etc. Meanwhile the soldiers from the other side of the country are told to turn their weapons to your friends, uncles etc. who they're told have decided to kill their friends, uncles etc. Then you let both troops know of the atrocities the other is committing, and there you have it: a merciless foreign occupation force.
I've missed my true calling as an evil overlord, or a President of the United States :).
Well, you gotta admit it's pretty impressive combination of strength and stupidity to stab someone to death with a gun ;).
I find it hard to believe that most people in Asia give a damn whether people half the world away call them "Easterners" or "Asians", since I know I don't give damn if they call me "European" or "Westerner". Do you have any kind of evidence to back up your claim ?
But they already are. Or do you think that the policemen raided the Pirate Bay for free ? No, enforcing copyrights costs a lot.
That said, the original premise of "movies can't be performed live" is completely false. Movies can certainly be performed "live": in a movie theater. The theater has resources a private individual can't get due to expenses (big screen and good sound system), and the manager and the movie producer are certainly free to make a contract that keeps the manager from simply copying the film reel to other threaters; the audience may copy, but that doesn't matter, since they still won't have equivalent home theaters.
But anyway, if the movie industry really can't survive without government subsidizies in the form of an artificial monopolies like copyright, perhaps it should curl up and die ? With computers becoming more and more powerful and electronic (video) cameras becoming cheaper, making movies yourself is slowly becoming a real possibility. Are the big studios really needed anymore ? Bad enough to justify copyrights ?
But I understood that other DVDs work perfectly fine in these DVD players ? And these "copy-protected" DVDs fail in other players too ?
That's why I assumed that it's the DVD and not DVD player which is the problem here. That they are made by the same company is indeed ironic, and speaks volumes of Sony's quality controls, but it still makes Sony DVDs, not Sony DVD players, defective. Sony players are just low-quality, being unable to deal with defective DVDs, not outright defective :).
Of course it's Ford's fault. However, your car (DVD player) is perfectly fine; it's the fuel (Sony DVDs) which is the problem. Not that that really matters, I guess.
Abuse ? Returning a defective DVD is exercising your legal right to demand that the store fullfills its end of the contract of sale which assigned the ownership of the DVD to you in exchange of money in the first place. The store failed their end - they gave you a product which doesn't work as promised - but you are graciously giving them a chance to fix their error before suing them, since you believe they made it in good faith rather than as a deliberate attempt to defraud you. How is that abuse ?
It is impossible to prove that something didn't get rid of your headache. It is trivial to demonstrate that these "DVDs" don't work as promised by simply putting them into a DVD player and atttempting to play them. Your example is defective :).
Of course they are. They may avoid charges of fraud if they acted on good faith, thinking that the advertizing was correct and not being able to check the truth of this without opening the package for example, but they most certainly are required to either replace the defective product with a new one or give the customers money back.
Where on Earth did you get the idea that you can be not responsible for a sale you made ? Or that intentionally selling defective products would make you less responsible than doing it by accident ?
Your ability to return a defective DVD is firmly rooted in consumer protection laws as well as contractual laws. It is not a gracious courtesy from the stores part, but a legal obligation underlaying the whole economy: you must deliver what you promised, or dissolve the contract, refunding any already made payments.
It's exactly the same thing that causes you to lose your house or car if you fail to make the payments in time; only this time it's working for you.
Apart from the fact that I've never encountered a DVD which wouldn't play on Linux (using Xine), I think the court - even US court - might find the argument that DVDs sold as video DVDs don't have to play on DVD players strange when the whole purpose of a video DVD is to be played on DVD player.
Retail store is neither uninvolved nor a third party. It sold you the defective DVD; it is responsible of fullfilling its end of that contract by delivering you a non-defective DVD or, if that should turn out to be impossible (as is likely since all the DVDs of this batch seem to be defective), dissolving the contract and giving you your money back. The store can then take the issue up with whoever sold the DVD to them, and get their money back.
But
Why should the DVD player makers take the DVD players back ? They work perfectly, after all; it's not their fault that Sony releases disks containing malformed data. It's Sony's phony DVD's that should be recalled.
To continue the car analogies: if your local service station decides to fill the gas pumps with tap water to "prevent criminal use of the car" or some nonsense like that, should your cars manufacturer recall the car when it fails to work with a tank full of water ?
Unless you write an EULA, in which case you can change the terms of sale after the sale (or licensing or whatever you actually get from a software store).
Except sue you anyway, and keep the case going long enough that the cost of defending yourself drives you banckrupt. After all, you are no IBM, and MS is no SCO. Of course MS isn't likely to care enough to crush you like a grape, but if it wants to, it can.
A mere mortal like yourself has about as much of a chance of victory against corporations as old Greek heros of myth had against Greek gods. Best you can hope for is that you won't be paid any attention; but drawing it to yourself risks getting your proverbial liver torn to bits by birds. Or non-proverbial, if the corporation in question happens to have connection to the Russian underworld (or the Greek one ;)...
Coming to think of it, I really like the thought of corporations as modern-day equivalent of Greek gods: powerful, immortal, and not really held to any moral or legal standards. Gods of Capitalism, so to say. But what would that make Fiscal Quarter - a single era in cyclical time ?-)
The whole purpose of a moderation system is to moderate certain kind of comments up and others down. A moderation system which doesn't achieve this would be modding comments randomly, not based on their contents, since otherwise there would emerge a pattern of certain kinds of comments getting modded up and other kinds down.
In other words: this is a feature, not a bug :).
While that certainly sounds tough, it doesn't help the guy who has to program the robot any. "Victory" is nowhere near well-defined concept to express in any programming language, being entirely dependent on both the situation (both military and political) and the particular person being asked. You need to define the rules of behavior the robot should follow in order to program it; after all, you can't program if you don't know what the program is supposed to do.
Besides, it's certainly possible to come in 2nd in a war or a battle. For example, Finland lost Winter and Continuation Wars against Soviet Russia, but managed to avoid Soviet occupation. Another good example is the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk during WW2; while retreat is hardly a victory, it allowed the British army to stay functional and eventually win.
And conversely, following the doctrine of "victory at any cost" is sure to cause a huge backslash of public opinion due to the atrocities it will surely lead.
Or wait for the students to put this together and realize that their "rights" are just so many empty words, and don't actually have any weight or power whatsoever, and the people who died for them died for nothing. That is a lesson which will help them for the rest of their lives. "Know your place, shut your face; the nail that sticks out gets hammered down."
Conformity is neccessary for the society to hold together, and society funds schools for its own good.
So, is this the real-world "Memoirs of a Monster" ?-)
Why ? Isn't their agenda removing the remaining limitations from total contractual freedom, allowing Corporate America to use its vastly superior resources to force even more onerous demands on the people who have to deal with it ?
Libertarians seem to think that removing state power makes people free. It does not, it simply creates a power vacuum for someone else to fill. The large corporations seem most likely, already practically controlling most countries, but even if they fail to seize power someone else won't; no matter what, you will always have an overlord, and in the end, despite their numerous flaws the current semi-democratical Western states are amongst the most benevolent overlords in human history.
All of this, of course, assumes that the libertarians will actually keep their word if elected, which would require them to be resistant to the temptation of power. Given history of politics, that seems a rather generous assumption.
Handguns aren't tools, they're weapons.
Or you they just make getNextObjectID() roll over at the proper place: "if objectID == FFEEEEEE Then objectID = FF000000 Else objectID = objectID + 1; return objectID".
Then again, after seeing Morrowinds "let's run all the scripts once every frame and let each of them check if the user is activating the object this script actually applies to" approach, I can't say I'm the least bit surprised. Event-driven code is sooo 2000.
Drive a wooden stake through whatever passes as the heart, cut off the head, stuff the mouth full of garlic, burn the remains, expose the ashes to direct sunshine for at least three hours, sprinkle them with holy water, bury them in consecrated ground and build a crossing of 8 highways right on top of them. Then have the pope perform funeral rites there, and finally nuke the whole place from orbit.
That ought to do it :).
Without commenting on your arrogant assertion that you know how someone else should live their live, this rises up a rather interesting point: why does the Chinese government want children to spend their time in reality rather than virtual reality ? After all, people playing WoW are far less likely to demand freedom or engage in other activities antithethical to the Chinese political system than people spending their time speaking with each other and perhaps coming up with dangerous ideas lie freedom from censorship. Warm cocoon makes people drowsy, cold reality shocks them wide awake. The former makes it far easier for the Chinese government to stay in power than the latter.
Is this a case of a tyrant starting to believe his own lies about his benevolence, or does the Chinese government just have absolute confidence in their iron fist ?
No one is accusing you of that. Leave the straw men out of this.
Maybe you have good reason to think he's guilty, or maybe you just hate his guts and want to turn public opinion against him, in hopes of making it more likely he's convicted (judges and jury's are just human, in the end) or giving him hell in case he's found innocent, or maybe you're just wrong. Since you didn't show your evidence, it can't be reviewed and its merits analyzed, so there's no way to counter or confirm your claims, making them essentially equivalent to FUD.
In other words, you're spreading rumors and harming Reiser's reputation, and doing it in a way that makes it impossible for him to defend himself even if he's in fact not guilty. That is not proper. To further illustrate the point, let's take a hypothetical post about you:
I'm a friend of a sister of a parent of a 10-year-old kid roman_mir molested. Now, I won't post evidence for this online, of course, since it isn't proper, but I'm 99% certain that roman_mir is a pedophile and has raped little girls.
Imagine your real name appearing on the above paragraph, where any search engine will forever after pick up the pedophilia accusation in association with your name, and think long and hard of the possible consequences, especially if you ever actually are accused of such a crime before a court; do you see the problem of posting this kind of opinions online in the way you did ?
In short: if you can't or won't post the evidence for your accusations of serious crimes, don't post the accusations either. And yes, "I know the case, and am 99% certain he's guilty" (emphasis mine) is an accusation.
Anyway, you either get the point or you won't, and agree or won't; either way, I've explained and argued for it as clearly as I can, and will not reply anymore, since that would be just rehashing the same argument and therefore a waste of time.