That's what they did to the DOJ, but is certainly not what happened with SCO.
SCO demanded (and got) their entire code repository and programmer notes for AIX and some other products going back to the dawn of time, and IBM strenuously objected as it meant thousands of lawyer- and coder-hours to detangle those repositories from others on the same system that they knew they were never going to see a dime for. Not one line of which appeared in SCO's final post-discovery complaint.
Actually, the Nazgul have been very methodical and deliberate in the SCO proceeding, albeit in the face of epic discovery delay shenanigans. Novell's law firm Morrison and Foster (domain name - mofo.com!) have been the vicious attack dogs. Probably has to do more with strategy ("crush them into neutronium" vs. "get our money before it's gone") than capability.
Your CC directly debits your bank account? Of course not.
Oh, you're talking about a debit card? Well, for one thing you need to allow check deposits a week to clear (and up to 2 weeks for deposits over some arbitrary limit, usually around $5k). It's not enjoyable, but it's reality.
Second, get an overdraft protection line of credit for your checking account. The $0.75 in finance charges that accrue over the day or two gap between withdrawal and deposit is far preferable to huge overdraft fees and NSF hassles. Don't have that option at your bank? Join a credit union, where their goal isn't to fuck their customers for every last dime.
I've contested a parking ticket in NYC (came back from walking 25 feet to the muni-meter to get my receipt to find the car being written up, at which point the ticket-writer said there wouldn't be any problem). Despite providing the receipt and an affadavit from my passenger, no fine reduction for me. Luckily it was in Queens so it was "only" $75.
The earned/unearned income distinction is silly, and has been addressed at length elsewhere, but the concept of a gross receipts tax for businesses is terrible. It puts a disproportionate pressure on low margin businesses (like supermarkets), kicks businesses that lose money for the year in the groin (especially small startups and freelancers), and says nothing useful about how to tax anything in the financial sector (just what are a bank's 'gross receipts'? If it's the total amount deposited, a bank could be bankrupted by a someone repeatedly depositing and withdrawing the same funds.)
I live and operate a small business in a municipality with a gross receipts tax, and it blows as both a business owner and as a consumer.
1. Depends how you do it. Thorium and pebble beds being two of the ways to have enough fuel for millennia.
2. Depends how you do it. If you're reprocessing almost all your waste and only have to dispose of a small amount of hot (industrially useful) stuff for a couple of hundred years, it's not so bad.
3. Yes, but since the OP was talking about single-digit percentages of the entire southwestern desert, the footprint of a nuclear plant or fifty is going to be a lot smaller.
OK, try this on for size - the Hep A vaccine has SEIZURES as a 1%(!) chance side effect in children under 2. My under 2-year old is not in day care, hence extremely low risk of exposure, so we're delaying it until he's 2 and seizures are not an issue. Our pediatrician is fine with this. Are we naughty vaccine-avoiding parents, or making an informed choice to play the best odds?
Lungfish? Manatees? Feathered dinosaurs? Egg-laying marsupials? Darwin's own Galapagos Finches? That argument is silly, because it glosses over the fact that these processes happen on a timescale we can't observe.
I would argue that terrorism in Israel/Palestine, through the overreactions it intentionally provokes from the other side, has been extremely effective at effecting an almost 180 degree shift in public perceptions of Israel in Europe and the USA. "The Jews still being there" is not a rational yardstick for Palestinian success or failure unless you think genocide is an acceptable political goal - there are millions of Jews in Israel, and most of them, most of their parents, and a lot of their grandparents were born there. And don't tell me that Hamas, and the PLO before them, ruling Gaza and part of the West Bank; and Hezbollah the de facto government of large parts of Lebanon, isn't a measure of success by most yardsticks.
The sad reality is that terrorist/guerrilla tactics are the only way to fight an opponent with a technologically modern army if you don't have one yourself - bleed the enemy and your own civilians until civilians in the enemy country and the rest of the world make it politically impossible for the enemy to continue on their course.
Collada is making some nice inroads in the art pipeline area. Almost every major 3D package has import/export support.
I've been doing some contract work with a commercial, but indie-priced 3D engine that uses Collada as the only importable format, and the users on its forum have no trouble getting model, skeleton, and animation data in from blender, 3ds max, and maya (well, the 3ds max collada support is a bit lacking in places, but they're releasing updates ~3 times a year, and since it's XML, it's not impossible to fix things yourself).
The guy set up and ran the illegal mail server that Bush, Cheney, Rove and others used to evade the Presidential Records Act (remember the "missing emails"?). I imagine the email going through that thing was anything but boring, quite a bit easier to decipher than a bunch of numbers.
Because one is a book (a fixed expression of a creative idea) and the other is a game (an abstract set of rules). And the third one is software, and software copyrights work somewhat the way you describe (google "abstraction, filtration, comparison test" - this is how, e.g. similar applications can exist that copy each others' features). Software patents are not enshrined in black-letter law, being instead the result of court decisions.
I think the GP overestimates the state of the art in 3D rendering and animation. I don't think any team anywhere could fake a video like that to the satisfaction of the people who were actually there. Much less do it in secret on a DA's budget.
Slashdot Mirror
"What kind of ship is that?"
"Frigate."
"Yeah, I don't give two shits either."
Ba-dum-bum!
SCO demanded (and got) their entire code repository and programmer notes for AIX and some other products going back to the dawn of time, and IBM strenuously objected as it meant thousands of lawyer- and coder-hours to detangle those repositories from others on the same system that they knew they were never going to see a dime for. Not one line of which appeared in SCO's final post-discovery complaint.
Actually, the Nazgul have been very methodical and deliberate in the SCO proceeding, albeit in the face of epic discovery delay shenanigans. Novell's law firm Morrison and Foster (domain name - mofo.com!) have been the vicious attack dogs. Probably has to do more with strategy ("crush them into neutronium" vs. "get our money before it's gone") than capability.
Oh, you're talking about a debit card? Well, for one thing you need to allow check deposits a week to clear (and up to 2 weeks for deposits over some arbitrary limit, usually around $5k). It's not enjoyable, but it's reality.
Second, get an overdraft protection line of credit for your checking account. The $0.75 in finance charges that accrue over the day or two gap between withdrawal and deposit is far preferable to huge overdraft fees and NSF hassles. Don't have that option at your bank? Join a credit union, where their goal isn't to fuck their customers for every last dime.
Oh yeah? I did that on a solar calculator!
Where's the profit in making $700 in 3 weeks?
I've contested a parking ticket in NYC (came back from walking 25 feet to the muni-meter to get my receipt to find the car being written up, at which point the ticket-writer said there wouldn't be any problem). Despite providing the receipt and an affadavit from my passenger, no fine reduction for me. Luckily it was in Queens so it was "only" $75.
Yes it does. It still chokes on PDF plots from AutoCAD, though, although it is significantly improved from 2.x
I live and operate a small business in a municipality with a gross receipts tax, and it blows as both a business owner and as a consumer.
1. Depends how you do it. Thorium and pebble beds being two of the ways to have enough fuel for millennia. 2. Depends how you do it. If you're reprocessing almost all your waste and only have to dispose of a small amount of hot (industrially useful) stuff for a couple of hundred years, it's not so bad. 3. Yes, but since the OP was talking about single-digit percentages of the entire southwestern desert, the footprint of a nuclear plant or fifty is going to be a lot smaller.
When a bank or similar asks to see your 1040 from last year, do you tell them that?
OK, try this on for size - the Hep A vaccine has SEIZURES as a 1%(!) chance side effect in children under 2. My under 2-year old is not in day care, hence extremely low risk of exposure, so we're delaying it until he's 2 and seizures are not an issue. Our pediatrician is fine with this. Are we naughty vaccine-avoiding parents, or making an informed choice to play the best odds?
Lungfish? Manatees? Feathered dinosaurs? Egg-laying marsupials? Darwin's own Galapagos Finches? That argument is silly, because it glosses over the fact that these processes happen on a timescale we can't observe.
+5 Informative for a graphic diarrhea analogy. I tip my hat to you!
A 7500 sqft house? How many dozen children do you have?
Maybe this?
A modern-day Woodward and Bernstein, backed by principled editors?
The sad reality is that terrorist/guerrilla tactics are the only way to fight an opponent with a technologically modern army if you don't have one yourself - bleed the enemy and your own civilians until civilians in the enemy country and the rest of the world make it politically impossible for the enemy to continue on their course.
Ireland has a low percentage of the populace who believe in god? Not even the map you posted agrees.
Collada is making some nice inroads in the art pipeline area. Almost every major 3D package has import/export support. I've been doing some contract work with a commercial, but indie-priced 3D engine that uses Collada as the only importable format, and the users on its forum have no trouble getting model, skeleton, and animation data in from blender, 3ds max, and maya (well, the 3ds max collada support is a bit lacking in places, but they're releasing updates ~3 times a year, and since it's XML, it's not impossible to fix things yourself).
You need to tell that to a competent electrician right before they examine the wiring in your house and fix it.
Say what now?
The guy set up and ran the illegal mail server that Bush, Cheney, Rove and others used to evade the Presidential Records Act (remember the "missing emails"?). I imagine the email going through that thing was anything but boring, quite a bit easier to decipher than a bunch of numbers.
Because one is a book (a fixed expression of a creative idea) and the other is a game (an abstract set of rules). And the third one is software, and software copyrights work somewhat the way you describe (google "abstraction, filtration, comparison test" - this is how, e.g. similar applications can exist that copy each others' features). Software patents are not enshrined in black-letter law, being instead the result of court decisions.
I think the GP overestimates the state of the art in 3D rendering and animation. I don't think any team anywhere could fake a video like that to the satisfaction of the people who were actually there. Much less do it in secret on a DA's budget.