Actually no, the mesh networking continues to operate as a relay even when the laptop isn't on, using minimal battery power while doing so. All you need is a laptop within range, with some amount of batter power, and you can use it to reach other laptops and/or internet access points.
Again, you're making a lot of assumptions here. One that someone won't let the laptop lose power, and two that there WILL be another laptop around to complete the mesh and three that one of those will have network connectivity. I can't imagine though trying to do work when my laptop needs to communicate through five others to a small internet connection, that may or may not work.
The laptops are being targeted to many countries in Africa, Asia and South America. I believe they are also planning on sending them to some remote areas of Appalachian America. Some of these areas have concentrated populations, some don't. Some have existing power and communication infrastructure, some don't. The OLPC was designed to operate in both situations.
In densely populated areas it may work, but I doubt it will in more remote areas. Africa in particular is mostly a bunch of remote villages, again unless I'm mistaken.
I'm comparing the availability of human power to the availability of electrical power. Everywhere you go, human power is available to you. Not so with the grid.
Well if you're supposed to be a 9 to 5 coder, reliablity is important too. So it's great you can power the laptop, that was never really my point. My point is that it doesn't sound reliable enough to keep your job if you're in one of these small remote villages.
We haven't even talked about any language barriers either.
You think that utilities can build power plants as fast or faster than people can consume electric vehicle? "My Capitalism, let me show them to you." You did use the word "should" so I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
Yes, I do think we can build a few more nuke plants before everyone has an EV. Sorry, it's just simplier to build a couple of those than it will be for each and every owner of a car to move to an EV.
We never do what we should and is why we are going to fail when we go to an electric car economy. The ethanol fiasco is nothing other than a harbinger of what will happen when we start going electric en mass.
Huh? We never do what we should? Give me a break. Do you remember the Y2K bugs? Probably not, since we caught that early enough to fix the problems or figure out how things would fail. You're just being a doomsayer yelling "the end is near!" Everyone that has said that has been wrong so far.
You are also forgetting that infrastructure is not limited to just the power source. There are millions of miles of power lines that need to be replaced across the country.
Ya, just like we couldn't keep up with growing population and growing demand as more and more electrical applicances have been pumped out.
Remember the cable companies and what they had to go through replacing their coaxial. And how are your cable TV rates holding up? How much tax money was used to assist conversions? How many companies went bankrupt before they had a digital infrastructure.
Huh? TW and Comcast are still around. Adelphia went bankrupt due to poor management, not because of changing to digital. Where are you getting this stuff?
And of course denser markets will get first dibs, good luck if you like in rural America where you travel the furthest and fuel cost hurt you the most. Of course because electricity can be traded rural America will no be spared, their utilities will sell it tot he open market for higher prices.
Um, even if this were true, so what? That's the price people pay for CHOOSING to live in the middle of no where.
You can't just keep slapping on more nuclear power plants on the gird and think you solved the problem. When housing goes up cities and towns zone for it. They have weeks sometimes even months of planning the preparation. But when capitalism means government bureaucracy, they clash.
Again, you're just being a doomsayer. We can build more nuclear plants, and the more we get going now the better. What's your alternative anyway? Continue to burn oil until it runs out or destroys our economy because people are now attacking our suppilers? Again, consumers aren't going to be switching faster than generation can keep up.
But when capitalism means government bureaucracy, they clash. People will consumer faster than the government can replace powerlines. Consumers will tax the grids and the utilities will up the price to compensate for it.
Government mostly doesn't own the lines at all; private companies do, they're called distributers. That was part of the deregulation, suppliers and distributers were seperated.
Were you not aware that auto drivers are required to have liability insurance, which will cover your medical needs? It's call auto insurance. Of course if you choose not to have coverage on yourself, that burden is easily solved by not providing medical care if you can't pay for yourself.
Ugh. I agree, and it makes me wonder if there really ISN'T a conspircy against EVs. Why on earth can't they make an EV look like a normal fucking car?? Honda finally seems to get it, with it's Civic hybrids, I hope other's do as well.
Well, let me take a stab at it. Airbags help improve your safety, yes. So why don't we just let people decide for themselves how much safety is worth to them, and allow auto manufacturers to produce cars with or without airbags? If you claim it's an insurance problems... well that's already solved, as you already get a discount if your car has certain safety features. So there's no need to force airbags on people that don't want them, just like there's no need to take away fat from foods where people want to have them.
Ok, and after the upgrades, then what? Oh ya, prices stop rising. Also, nuclear IMO is a better option than coal, and we should be building more nuke plants even without everyone moving over to EVs in one night (which will never happen, so the electric price increases will be more gradual, unlike the $0.12 / gallon gas rose in just a few days).
Plus, as we find more efficent ways to generate power those can be replaced withour requiring everyone to throw out their cars. Overall, EVs will be a huge improvement.
Same operating costs? Doubtful. You don't need a transmission, alternator or a host of other components of common cars today, so that's much cheaper. And assuming TM is accurate in the price of a full charge being less that $5, you won't have to pay the ~$3 / gallon of gas which ISN'T tax.
Not so much the wired connectivity, but the laptops themselves form a "mesh" network among each other, and the OLPC program is setting up internet access points for them to use. This means that if any one laptop in the "mesh" can access the internet access point, then all other laptops in the "mesh" can access it as well. You can be miles away from the access point, and still get internet connectivity. But even if the internet access isn't available, the laptops themselves can still network amongst each other.
So it largely depends on if other's in the area are using the laptop.. it doesn't sound very reliable, especially if you need to meet some kind of deadline.
It happens all the time, what industry have you been working in? Most likely there will be "consultant" firms, like India's Tata Corp, that will sign up these young coders, then advertise their services to western companies. But heck, even if they only get work off rentacoder.com, it'll still pay them more than they can get in their own country.
India is a lot more centralized that many nations in Africa, which from what I understand is where the XO laptops are going. From what I undertstand, most of Africa are these remote villages. Inida's coders are in cities. I'm also kinda puzzled why you think everyone in software knows the exact location of outsourced consultants.
Finally, I doubt there will be much help even if the whole scheme "works." India is now losing the spotlight to other even cheaper countries. If that's the intent of these laptops, I can only hope they fail. I don't want to have to compete for jobs with someone who lives in a hut with no running water. I prefer my current standard of living.
How do you reliably get internet connectivity if you need a 120v wall outlet to power your laptop? Seems to me a bicycle is more portable, and definitely more available in those countries. Then again, they also can use a pulley, a solar cell, a cow, and yes, even a 120v wall outlet, plus many more.
Are you seriously comparing the reliablity of the eletric / communications grid in the US with peddling a bike or relying on cow droppings? Maybe my notion of Africa is wrong, although I kind of doubt it.
Really? OLPC is setting up wireless / wired network connectivity? Even in parts of Africa currently engulfed in war? Benevolent indeed.
Why would a C/Java/Python developer in a 3rd world country need a data center, when their employers in the first world will provide that? All they need it the knowledge to do the work, the equipment to do it on, and a way to communicate and transmit the work to their employer. Seems to be that OLPC provides all that.
How is someone going to hire said programmer if they don't know one is available in some remote village? Do you really think a company is going to hire someone, site unseen in a 3rd world nation? Especially given the number of scams which originate there? How exactly do you get reliable internet connectivity if you need a bicycle to power the laptop? Come on, get real here.
Still producing greenhouse gasses though, and now each individual needs to maintain it properly to keep 90% effiency, which I don't think many would do. Natural gas (which is what our water heater runs on) emits CO2 and that's about it, unlike coal which emits a small amount of radioactive particles. Coal isn't clean.
Huh? How exactly are laptops going to help build up poorer nations? So they can know everything and still not be able to use it because there are virtually no natural resources to use to build an economy?
Well, if you continue the highlight three more words, you'll see the OP is correct.
While lying outside the court room is not illegal, if it contradicts what you said under oath it could very well be a problem. How do we know which one was the lie?
Testimony is by defintion a statement made under oath, so I'm not even really sure what you're trying to say.
That is not the issue. If a NY resident buys something they are subject to NY tax, no matter where they bought it or how it was shipped to them, by truck or by wire. The sale takes place wherever the buyer lives.
There's links to cases in this article which say exactly the opposite. If I drive to NY, buy something at a B&M store, I don't have to pay sales tax to PA. The sale occured where the merchant received payment, AFAICT. Now, instead of leaving, I do the same thing online. My card is charged by a server in NY. The SC has clearly said as much.
I don't think anything in the constition says that I have to pay sales tax to my home state for a transaction which took place outside the state border. I've never heard of such a thing, and to date everything I have seen has said this is absolutely not allowed. People are not citizens of any one state, they are citizens under the Federal government.
Really, Hans' biggest problem is that he destroyed evidence after a search warrant was served listing that specific evidence. A lot of people who comment on this subject don't seem to realize that Hans disposed of the car seat and the interior trim, he very thoroughly washed out the interior of the car using a quite unorthodox method (hosing it down totally!), and then he hid the car... AFTER he had been named as a suspect for murder and AFTER a search warrant was served specifically identifying that ar.
People "dump things" all the time. People who dump things that are named as evidence in murder trials where they are the only suspect, need very good explanations for the action (and "I don't remember" is as far from "very good explanation" as it gets).
Basically, there's no reason to presume that the evidence he destroyed would have been exculpatory.
Have you even been accused of something? I have, and believe me, it's easier to NOT help them. That's the problem; there may have been blood in the car. The police of course say it's because he killed her. Is that the only possiblity? No, not by a long shot. The blood may be years old. She may have cut herself and bled. She may have even framed him. Given there's no body, I don't think we should rule that out. But the problem is the police like to think there's only one possible scenario, and will purposefully ignore any evidence there might be to the contrary. And if they found blood, what exactly does that prove? Nothing, except that she bled in the car. But everyone for some reason likes to make the "logical" leap to "Hans killed her." Again, without a body, that's quite the leap. People seem to WANT to believe the worst possible scenario. I don't know why that is.
Three possibilities: Nina's not dead but Hans is dumb enough and unlucky enough that it looks enough like he killed her and disposed of the body, and now goes to jail until at least 2033. Nina's dead, and somebody else killed her, and knowingly or not, Hans has destroyed the evidence and has covered it up so that the killer is free. Or Nina's dead, he killed her, just like the judgment of his trial says he did.
Or Nina is not dead, and framed her husband, and is now underground. How could Hans prove that happened, if the only evidence was blood in his car? Logically, it's just as likely she framed him as he murdered her. If someone else had killed her, but the blood is in her car, wouldn't you be worried in that situtation? Look at your response to it; he's the only possible choice. If he left the car alone, would your line of thinking still be teh same? I suspect you'd still think he did it, as the alternate scenarios are just his lies, after all. As I said, people seem to WANTa certain outcome, and dismiss others even though they are logicaly all just as likely as the police scenario.
It's much harder than most people seem to think to "just up and disappear."
That's very naive. I assure you it is VERY easy. That's all I will say.
It's clear that you will not be convinced that Hans killed Nina until he confesses (and perhaps not even then.) It is also clear that you are not convinced that Nina's dead (even though at this point, that premise really does require you to find her.)
No, his confession would have a lot of sway over me, provided he's not gaining anything by it (i.e., it wasn't coerced.. again, look at Texas.. coercien happens more than you know). At this point, no, I'm not convieced she's dead. Without a body, we can't PROVE that she is. It's not on me to prove she's alive.
also pretty clear that you don't understand just how damning it was for Hans to have destroyed the car, in particular, and how much worse it is for him that he did so only *after* being accused of the crime and only *after* the search warrant was served. To everybody who claims they've thrown things away and forgotten about it... I have not heard fr
How about because it's not original? You're taking character names, past experiences, personalities, the world they live in, the "rules" of said world. You're taking quite a bit. Calling it original is flat out wrong.
Services MAY be taxable under state laws, depending on the state. In VT, services are NOT taxable.
A state that is taxing a sale taking place in another state seems to violate the Interstate Commerce clause, at least that's my arm chair understanding. Couldn't it be argued that the sales tax is acting as a tarrif on imports from another state? Any real lawyers have any comments about this? Anyone know enough about the founders intent? They had postal services even 200 years ago... the concept hasn't changed.
Um, you realize that "add value" means the book in question is a derivitive work, and thus Rowling is prefectly within her rights as author of the original work, right?
Well there is the notion of criminally negligent. I think you can safely argue drunk driving falls into that category. My prefered method of DUI would be pretty harsh punishments for anything that fits CN. If someone dies as a result of your neglegance, it should automatically be grounds for murder one. That way we don't need millions of laws that give police unwarrented powers and that people cannot possible know them all.
Yes, it's understandable they are angry. What is not as understandable is directing their anger to areas which it doesn't belong. Be angry at the drunk driver, not a game.
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Actually no, the mesh networking continues to operate as a relay even when the laptop isn't on, using minimal battery power while doing so. All you need is a laptop within range, with some amount of batter power, and you can use it to reach other laptops and/or internet access points.
Again, you're making a lot of assumptions here. One that someone won't let the laptop lose power, and two that there WILL be another laptop around to complete the mesh and three that one of those will have network connectivity. I can't imagine though trying to do work when my laptop needs to communicate through five others to a small internet connection, that may or may not work.
The laptops are being targeted to many countries in Africa, Asia and South America. I believe they are also planning on sending them to some remote areas of Appalachian America. Some of these areas have concentrated populations, some don't. Some have existing power and communication infrastructure, some don't. The OLPC was designed to operate in both situations.
In densely populated areas it may work, but I doubt it will in more remote areas. Africa in particular is mostly a bunch of remote villages, again unless I'm mistaken.
I'm comparing the availability of human power to the availability of electrical power. Everywhere you go, human power is available to you. Not so with the grid.
Well if you're supposed to be a 9 to 5 coder, reliablity is important too. So it's great you can power the laptop, that was never really my point. My point is that it doesn't sound reliable enough to keep your job if you're in one of these small remote villages.
We haven't even talked about any language barriers either.
You think that utilities can build power plants as fast or faster than people can consume electric vehicle? "My Capitalism, let me show them to you." You did use the word "should" so I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
Yes, I do think we can build a few more nuke plants before everyone has an EV. Sorry, it's just simplier to build a couple of those than it will be for each and every owner of a car to move to an EV.
We never do what we should and is why we are going to fail when we go to an electric car economy. The ethanol fiasco is nothing other than a harbinger of what will happen when we start going electric en mass.
Huh? We never do what we should? Give me a break. Do you remember the Y2K bugs? Probably not, since we caught that early enough to fix the problems or figure out how things would fail. You're just being a doomsayer yelling "the end is near!" Everyone that has said that has been wrong so far.
You are also forgetting that infrastructure is not limited to just the power source. There are millions of miles of power lines that need to be replaced across the country.
Ya, just like we couldn't keep up with growing population and growing demand as more and more electrical applicances have been pumped out.
Remember the cable companies and what they had to go through replacing their coaxial. And how are your cable TV rates holding up? How much tax money was used to assist conversions? How many companies went bankrupt before they had a digital infrastructure.
Huh? TW and Comcast are still around. Adelphia went bankrupt due to poor management, not because of changing to digital. Where are you getting this stuff?
And of course denser markets will get first dibs, good luck if you like in rural America where you travel the furthest and fuel cost hurt you the most. Of course because electricity can be traded rural America will no be spared, their utilities will sell it tot he open market for higher prices.
Um, even if this were true, so what? That's the price people pay for CHOOSING to live in the middle of no where.
You can't just keep slapping on more nuclear power plants on the gird and think you solved the problem. When housing goes up cities and towns zone for it. They have weeks sometimes even months of planning the preparation. But when capitalism means government bureaucracy, they clash.
Again, you're just being a doomsayer. We can build more nuclear plants, and the more we get going now the better. What's your alternative anyway? Continue to burn oil until it runs out or destroys our economy because people are now attacking our suppilers? Again, consumers aren't going to be switching faster than generation can keep up.
But when capitalism means government bureaucracy, they clash. People will consumer faster than the government can replace powerlines. Consumers will tax the grids and the utilities will up the price to compensate for it.
Government mostly doesn't own the lines at all; private companies do, they're called distributers. That was part of the deregulation, suppliers and distributers were seperated.
Were you not aware that auto drivers are required to have liability insurance, which will cover your medical needs? It's call auto insurance. Of course if you choose not to have coverage on yourself, that burden is easily solved by not providing medical care if you can't pay for yourself.
Ugh. I agree, and it makes me wonder if there really ISN'T a conspircy against EVs. Why on earth can't they make an EV look like a normal fucking car?? Honda finally seems to get it, with it's Civic hybrids, I hope other's do as well.
Well, let me take a stab at it. Airbags help improve your safety, yes. So why don't we just let people decide for themselves how much safety is worth to them, and allow auto manufacturers to produce cars with or without airbags? If you claim it's an insurance problems... well that's already solved, as you already get a discount if your car has certain safety features. So there's no need to force airbags on people that don't want them, just like there's no need to take away fat from foods where people want to have them.
Ok, and after the upgrades, then what? Oh ya, prices stop rising. Also, nuclear IMO is a better option than coal, and we should be building more nuke plants even without everyone moving over to EVs in one night (which will never happen, so the electric price increases will be more gradual, unlike the $0.12 / gallon gas rose in just a few days).
Plus, as we find more efficent ways to generate power those can be replaced withour requiring everyone to throw out their cars. Overall, EVs will be a huge improvement.
Same operating costs? Doubtful. You don't need a transmission, alternator or a host of other components of common cars today, so that's much cheaper. And assuming TM is accurate in the price of a full charge being less that $5, you won't have to pay the ~$3 / gallon of gas which ISN'T tax.
Not so much the wired connectivity, but the laptops themselves form a "mesh" network among each other, and the OLPC program is setting up internet access points for them to use. This means that if any one laptop in the "mesh" can access the internet access point, then all other laptops in the "mesh" can access it as well. You can be miles away from the access point, and still get internet connectivity. But even if the internet access isn't available, the laptops themselves can still network amongst each other.
So it largely depends on if other's in the area are using the laptop.. it doesn't sound very reliable, especially if you need to meet some kind of deadline.
It happens all the time, what industry have you been working in? Most likely there will be "consultant" firms, like India's Tata Corp, that will sign up these young coders, then advertise their services to western companies. But heck, even if they only get work off rentacoder.com, it'll still pay them more than they can get in their own country.
India is a lot more centralized that many nations in Africa, which from what I understand is where the XO laptops are going. From what I undertstand, most of Africa are these remote villages. Inida's coders are in cities. I'm also kinda puzzled why you think everyone in software knows the exact location of outsourced consultants.
Finally, I doubt there will be much help even if the whole scheme "works." India is now losing the spotlight to other even cheaper countries. If that's the intent of these laptops, I can only hope they fail. I don't want to have to compete for jobs with someone who lives in a hut with no running water. I prefer my current standard of living.
How do you reliably get internet connectivity if you need a 120v wall outlet to power your laptop? Seems to me a bicycle is more portable, and definitely more available in those countries. Then again, they also can use a pulley, a solar cell, a cow, and yes, even a 120v wall outlet, plus many more.
Are you seriously comparing the reliablity of the eletric / communications grid in the US with peddling a bike or relying on cow droppings? Maybe my notion of Africa is wrong, although I kind of doubt it.
Both of which are provided by the OLPC laptop.
Really? OLPC is setting up wireless / wired network connectivity? Even in parts of Africa currently engulfed in war? Benevolent indeed.
Why would a C/Java/Python developer in a 3rd world country need a data center, when their employers in the first world will provide that? All they need it the knowledge to do the work, the equipment to do it on, and a way to communicate and transmit the work to their employer. Seems to be that OLPC provides all that.
How is someone going to hire said programmer if they don't know one is available in some remote village? Do you really think a company is going to hire someone, site unseen in a 3rd world nation? Especially given the number of scams which originate there? How exactly do you get reliable internet connectivity if you need a bicycle to power the laptop? Come on, get real here.
Still producing greenhouse gasses though, and now each individual needs to maintain it properly to keep 90% effiency, which I don't think many would do. Natural gas (which is what our water heater runs on) emits CO2 and that's about it, unlike coal which emits a small amount of radioactive particles. Coal isn't clean.
I thought the problem was that the water didn't stay as hot for as long, and so you need a heater in each bathroom & kitchen.
Sounds great, if you don't need hot water.
Not if you don't have anything of value to start with. Computer equipment costs money, building communications costs money, etc.
India has natural resources, I don't know why you think otherwise. It's one of the lead iron ore exporters: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/in.html
Tell me... how does one build a data center when you have no capital to buy the equipment and put the infrastructure in place?
Huh? How exactly are laptops going to help build up poorer nations? So they can know everything and still not be able to use it because there are virtually no natural resources to use to build an economy?
Our making a buck is more important than some yellow person half a world away, right?
Well, if you continue the highlight three more words, you'll see the OP is correct.
While lying outside the court room is not illegal, if it contradicts what you said under oath it could very well be a problem. How do we know which one was the lie?
Testimony is by defintion a statement made under oath, so I'm not even really sure what you're trying to say.
That is not the issue. If a NY resident buys something they are subject to NY tax, no matter where they bought it or how it was shipped to them, by truck or by wire. The sale takes place wherever the buyer lives.
There's links to cases in this article which say exactly the opposite. If I drive to NY, buy something at a B&M store, I don't have to pay sales tax to PA. The sale occured where the merchant received payment, AFAICT. Now, instead of leaving, I do the same thing online. My card is charged by a server in NY. The SC has clearly said as much.
I don't think anything in the constition says that I have to pay sales tax to my home state for a transaction which took place outside the state border. I've never heard of such a thing, and to date everything I have seen has said this is absolutely not allowed. People are not citizens of any one state, they are citizens under the Federal government.
Lying under oath though is perjury.
Um, if what you've heard is true, why have threads been in Unix for a very long time?
Really, Hans' biggest problem is that he destroyed evidence after a search warrant
... I have not heard fr
was served listing that specific evidence. A lot of people who comment on this subject
don't seem to realize that Hans disposed of the car seat and the interior trim, he very
thoroughly washed out the interior of the car using a quite unorthodox method (hosing it
down totally!), and then he hid the car... AFTER he had been named as a suspect for murder
and AFTER a search warrant was served specifically identifying that ar.
People "dump things" all the time. People who dump things that are named as evidence in
murder trials where they are the only suspect, need very good explanations for the action
(and "I don't remember" is as far from "very good explanation" as it gets).
Basically, there's no reason to presume that the evidence he destroyed would have been exculpatory.
Have you even been accused of something? I have, and believe me, it's easier to NOT help them. That's the problem; there may have been blood in the car. The police of course say it's because he killed her. Is that the only possiblity? No, not by a long shot. The blood may be years old. She may have cut herself and bled. She may have even framed him. Given there's no body, I don't think we should rule that out. But the problem is the police like to think there's only one possible scenario, and will purposefully ignore any evidence there might be to the contrary. And if they found blood, what exactly does that prove? Nothing, except that she bled in the car. But everyone for some reason likes to make the "logical" leap to "Hans killed her." Again, without a body, that's quite the leap. People seem to WANT to believe the worst possible scenario. I don't know why that is.
Three possibilities: Nina's not dead but Hans is dumb enough and unlucky enough that it looks enough
like he killed her and disposed of the body, and now goes to jail until at least 2033. Nina's dead,
and somebody else killed her, and knowingly or not, Hans has destroyed the evidence and has covered it
up so that the killer is free. Or Nina's dead, he killed her, just like the judgment of his trial says
he did.
Or Nina is not dead, and framed her husband, and is now underground. How could Hans prove that happened, if the only evidence was blood in his car? Logically, it's just as likely she framed him as he murdered her. If someone else had killed her, but the blood is in her car, wouldn't you be worried in that situtation? Look at your response to it; he's the only possible choice. If he left the car alone, would your line of thinking still be teh same? I suspect you'd still think he did it, as the alternate scenarios are just his lies, after all. As I said, people seem to WANTa certain outcome, and dismiss others even though they are logicaly all just as likely as the police scenario.
It's much harder than most people seem to think to "just up and disappear."
That's very naive. I assure you it is VERY easy. That's all I will say.
It's clear that you will not be convinced that Hans killed Nina until he confesses (and perhaps not even then.) It is also clear that you are not convinced that Nina's dead (even though at this point, that premise really does require you to find her.)
No, his confession would have a lot of sway over me, provided he's not gaining anything by it (i.e., it wasn't coerced.. again, look at Texas.. coercien happens more than you know). At this point, no, I'm not convieced she's dead. Without a body, we can't PROVE that she is. It's not on me to prove she's alive.
also pretty clear that you don't understand just how damning it was for Hans to have destroyed the car, in particular, and how much worse it is for him that he did so only *after* being accused of the crime and only *after* the search warrant was served. To everybody who claims they've thrown things away and forgotten about it
How about because it's not original? You're taking character names, past experiences, personalities, the world they live in, the "rules" of said world. You're taking quite a bit. Calling it original is flat out wrong.
Services MAY be taxable under state laws, depending on the state. In VT, services are NOT taxable.
A state that is taxing a sale taking place in another state seems to violate the Interstate Commerce clause, at least that's my arm chair understanding. Couldn't it be argued that the sales tax is acting as a tarrif on imports from another state? Any real lawyers have any comments about this? Anyone know enough about the founders intent? They had postal services even 200 years ago... the concept hasn't changed.
Um, you realize that "add value" means the book in question is a derivitive work, and thus Rowling is prefectly within her rights as author of the original work, right?
Well there is the notion of criminally negligent. I think you can safely argue drunk driving falls into that category. My prefered method of DUI would be pretty harsh punishments for anything that fits CN. If someone dies as a result of your neglegance, it should automatically be grounds for murder one. That way we don't need millions of laws that give police unwarrented powers and that people cannot possible know them all.
Yes, it's understandable they are angry. What is not as understandable is directing their anger to areas which it doesn't belong. Be angry at the drunk driver, not a game.