Yes, it is moot. Neither free speech nor freedom of assembly are universally guaranteed by the First Amendment without qualification. RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) acts, for example, have been used against the Mafia and gangs by denying them the right to free assembly; anti discrimination laws (arguably) abridge free speech by making certain words unacceptable and even actionable.
It's up to the US Supreme Court to make the decision whether this proposed law is in violation of the Constitution. Since this is not the first attempt at legislation like this, I would hope that it is allowed to pass and then challenged in court. An adverse ruling by one of the various Courts of Appeals or the Supreme Court would help to put the last nail in this one...
(railroad tracks are made out of steel, blacksmiths work with steel, instead of making horseshoes, they could make railroad tracks, or even locomotive parts).
Except that making railroad tracks required a foundry and a lot of very heavy equipment and railroad equipment needs specialized tools - something that very few blacksmiths would have had laying about
Besides, it wasn't the railroads that killed the blacksmithing trade off, it was the motorcar. Railroads are great if you're going where they were, but horses were still needed once you got off. The motorcar, however, could go just about anyplace that there were roads. Which they frequently did. And when they broke, the person with the only tools available to fix them was, strangely enough, blacksmiths - who became the first service station mechanics.
There's a reason that Ben Affleck makes $12 million. It's the same reason that Michael Jordan, Luciano Pavarotti or anybody else famous could demand the salaries that they got - people will pay to see them. When you fill seats, you can demand any price that you want.
Will one of your $100,000 wonders cause people to watch the movie just because they're in it?
Um, no they don't. Maybe one of the banks that NationsBank acquired before BofA had used one and they've chosen to retain it, but my long-standing BofA account's login isn't a SSN and never has been.
According to a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, it'll cost states 11 billion dollars to comply with the Real ID act. There was no money put aside in the bill for states to comply, just a mandate to do so. California is looking to spend between 500 and 700 million dollars alone.
I'm not saying that the fine people from the states that are holding back are less than honest - some of them probably feel that privacy is important. But when your state's already facing a budget deficit - as most are - yet another unfunded Federal mandate is going to get a less than warm reception.
I had a tablet and tried Microsoft Reader. The quality was quite good and I found it readable in just about every lighting condition - until the battery ran out.
And that's my biggest problem. When I'm on a long flight, I just want to read. I would much rather take a book and leave my tablet in the bag than wonder what I'm going to do in two and a half hours when the battery dies for good. Until they can get that little difficulty ironed out, I'm gonna stick with the dead tree versions...
In America, you'll rarely find anything other than English or Spanish being used in the vast, vast majority of TV programming.
Could that possibly be because the majority of the people in the US speak either English or Spanish? If you look at local cable channels, rather than national networks, you start seeing shows in languages other than Spanish and English.
There are also a number of instructional videos that teach one how to play various musical instruments. Again, that's something you just won't see on American TV.
Yeah, but that's the difference between broadcast TV and the Internet. Stations have a finite space for programming and have to satisfy a majority of their audiences to keep the advertisers happy. I'm sure that they'd love to show, say, how to play the Aeolian harp, but nobody'd tune in and no advertiser would want to buy time there. Now, if people all of the sudden got interested in learning to play the Aeolian harp, they'd start showing up in CSI and you'd start seeing infomertials on harp-playing in the Sunday morning dead zone.
b) How 'bout if the person isn't qualified for the office (non-citizen, ex-felon, non-resident, termed-out, etc.)? Should the "people's choice" be elected anyway?
d)Hmmm. Rescinding votes. How far back can we go with this? If someone who voted for a bill that has already become law and rescinding that vote changes the outcome, will that earlier vote stand and, if not, will the law be invalidated? If you're from West Virginia, this'd be endless fun! Robert Byrd has been a Senator since 1958 - think of all of the legislation that you'd get the chance to review: the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and every other anti-discrimination law. The Americans with Disabilities Act. Sarbanes-Oxley. You could even vote to impeach President Clinton (he voted Not Guilty)!
And when the owner decides to raise your rent, you can just move, right?
No thanks, I prefer to have a bit more control over my destiny. When I last rented, the landlord raised the rent 4% per year (the maximum allowed in rent-controlled San Francisco) every other year. My house payment (which is tax-deductible, btw) will be the same in five years as it is right now.
Especially accessories for the ipod. $50 CDN for a piece of plastic to cover my 80GB ipod that I paid $399 for and that is not scratch resistant? $14.99 for a white colored sound splitter that I can buy at radio shack for $2.99 (already with 60% markup) - erm... no thanks!
Apple doesn't force you to buy their accessories - if you can find a better or cheaper item from Radio Shack, Belkin or somebody else that works with the iPod, Apple doesn't care (probably because they get a cut from licensing, but that's not important). If people want to have the Apple logo on it and are willing to pay more, so what? If the Zune sells well, there'll be third-party accessories for it too.
As to getting scratches, unless you keep it in the box, everything eventually scratches.
iPOD - It looks cool but is way over priced,
Yes, and so are Ferraris, and Corvettes, and sneakers that cost more than $50, and so are a whole bunch of other items that cost more than the sum of their parts. Regardless of their reason, the millions of iPod owners saw some value in it and were willing to pay the price. You didn't. Ok - there are other choices.
software is ultra-annoying for PC users.
If it is so annoying to PC users, why are they selling so many of them to folks with PCs? Most users don't care where iTunes puts the files just as long as they can find them. Yes, playlists aren't quite as granular as they could be - especially for videos - but I prefer them to having to remember which subdirectory that I put stuff that I'm looking for into.
Nobody wants to let the voter keep a piece of paper.
And I'll tell you why:
Voting machines with printers cost more.
The printers will jam; which will take the voting machine that it's attached to out of service until someone can fix it. If the machine is in a busy precinct, this may not happen immediately (assuming, of course, that someone *can* fix it - these people are volunteers, remember? They aren't selected for their technical skills). This problem becomes worse if the printer is integrated into the machine as the machines cannot be opened until after polls close.
50% of the little slips of paper will end up on the ground just outside the door - even if there is a trash bin. Before the voting machines, California ballots came with tear-off receipts and most of *them* didn't make it farther than 10 feet from the door before they were thrown away. I don't think that people have changed since then. The upside, I guess, is that it'll make exit pollers' jobs a bit easier...
Conspiracy theories aside, most local governments (who are the ones who actually run the elections) would have no problems giving receipts to users - when the technical and cost issues are ironed out.
Climbing the corporate ladder is not the only way to grow.
Climbing the corporate ladder isn't the only way to grow. Try taking on new tasks that aren't necessarily within your job description - learning some of the business functions that you are supporting, for example - that show your ability to grow and learn. You may not make more money, but you are less likely to be on the short list in a layoff, it looks great on your resume and you don't have to "sell out".
Because no elected government in its right mind would take it on.
Let's say that the US government decided that it was in society's best interest to develop this drug. After a couple of billion dollars of development and testing (they would still have to go through the FDA, right?), the drug turns out to have some fairly severe side effects and can't be sold. Now the original sponsors have to explain where the money went and why they decided spend the money in the first place. The next vote would be fun.
Or, let's say that the trials went well and the drug eventually made it to cancer patients - and turned out to be another Thalidomide. The lawsuits would last for decades and anybody who voted for it would be labeled as a killer - or worse.
Even if it does work, there will still be questions about why government decided to compete with private industry. Don't you think that the pharmaceutical companies based outside of the US would be very interested in why the US government decided to compete with them? In the best of circumstances, it's a no-win situation for everybody. Except, of course, for the cancer patient - but nobody really cares about them, anyway.
It's far easier politically to do nothing and complain about the rapacious pharmaceutical companies.
The big difference between what Sony did and Apple does is that Apple has never tried to hide the fact that it places limitations on what you can do with the songs that you buy from iTunes where Sony only acknowledged it after they were found out. No, you can't opt out of FairPlay. If Apple allowed it, iTunes would cease to exist because all of the major labels would pull out. It's not in Apple's best interest to do that - their legal department's big, but not quite big enough to go mano e mano with the RIAA and all of the labels at the same time.
Besides, the only way Apple could be clearer on what they are doing is to put "WARNING! SONGS CONTAIN SCARY EVIL DRM!!!" in big red letters on every page of iTunes and prompt users twice when they download.
I think that this is a publicity masterstroke by both sides.
Apple gets more airtime with the non-geek community because the only thing that news loves reporting on more than pop stars getting arrested is large companies suing each other. iPhone doesn't exist yet - when it does, Steve can claim that iPhone was only a working name and call it whatever their marketing staff says will get people's attention.
Cisco, on the other hand, gets ink for a product that just about nobody has heard of.
Everybody gets publicity, no money changes hands, no foul called.
I they are using insidious DRM technologies, how can you opt out of using them.
You opt out by not buying anything from iTunes.
The choice is never going to be as simple as: "DRM? click 'y' or 'n'". Apple has clearly said what can and can't be done with items purchased from their store. Nobody's forcing you to buy their stuff - if you don't agree, opt out by getting your music somewhere else.
What does this have to do with the World Trade Organization (or is there some other meaning to WTO that has something to do with trade)?
Sealand hasn't exactly been recognized as a nation, let alone a member nation of the WTO, so anything that the WTO comes up kind of excludes Sealand, doesn't it?
The same reason that a Republican controlled congress and White House could not get Judge Pickering confirmed to the court of appeals. Hell, it never even made it to a vote! Having a majority in congress != absolute rule.
It's not quite as simple as that. Yes, the Democrats were successfully able to filibuster the nomination, but it never made it to a vote because the White House wasn't sure that they wanted to use all of their brownie points for one judge when there was certain to be a Supreme Court justice vote coming up. Pickering had just enough perceived skeletons in his closet to make a vote for him a bit worrisome to some Republicans.
Take West Texas or Kansas for example or even any number of closed or soon-to-be-closed military bases.
Most of the military bases, even though they are in lightly-populated states, are still in somebody's back yard. A lot of small towns have grown up around these bases for personnel that couldn't live on base and for civilians that worked at the bases. They all can vote.
On the other hand, Yucca Mountain is hundreds of miles away from anything else in Nevada. That doesn't make the folks in Las Vegas or even Reno a whole lot happier about having a nuclear waste storage site located in the same state as them.
If this were true, why is it, in twelve years of being in the majority in Congress, Republicans were unable to pass bills to advance the construction of nuclear power plants? And please don't blame Clinton - he was only in the White House for half of it.
The simple fact is that just about nobody wants one (or, if they do, they don't want one in their back yard...).
Yes, they do scratch. And so does just about everything else with a flat surface that either doesn't have some type of screen protector or hasn't been taken out of the box because the buyer is afraid of scratches. I've had watches, multiple PDAs, laptops and games and every single one has had one or more scratches laid down on it - not because I was particularly rough with them, just because they were used.
Overpriced by your and the GP's estimation possibly, but they seem to be selling well enough, no? I'm not particularly happy with the pricing structure myself, but you can't disagree with the market - when the buyer and seller agree on a price the price is fair. You or I may not be able to afford it, but lots of people can.
I have told several friends of mine that they are absolutely not covered by writing "SEE PHOTO ID" on the back of their credit cards, in fact, quite the opposite.
I'd be interested to know what you mean by this statement. When you say "quite the opposite", do you mean that telling a cashier to ask for a photo ID increases the chance of fraud?
Slashdot Mirror
It's up to the US Supreme Court to make the decision whether this proposed law is in violation of the Constitution. Since this is not the first attempt at legislation like this, I would hope that it is allowed to pass and then challenged in court. An adverse ruling by one of the various Courts of Appeals or the Supreme Court would help to put the last nail in this one...
Except that making railroad tracks required a foundry and a lot of very heavy equipment and railroad equipment needs specialized tools - something that very few blacksmiths would have had laying about
Besides, it wasn't the railroads that killed the blacksmithing trade off, it was the motorcar. Railroads are great if you're going where they were, but horses were still needed once you got off. The motorcar, however, could go just about anyplace that there were roads. Which they frequently did. And when they broke, the person with the only tools available to fix them was, strangely enough, blacksmiths - who became the first service station mechanics.
Will one of your $100,000 wonders cause people to watch the movie just because they're in it?
Um, no they don't. Maybe one of the banks that NationsBank acquired before BofA had used one and they've chosen to retain it, but my long-standing BofA account's login isn't a SSN and never has been.
According to a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, it'll cost states 11 billion dollars to comply with the Real ID act. There was no money put aside in the bill for states to comply, just a mandate to do so. California is looking to spend between 500 and 700 million dollars alone.
I'm not saying that the fine people from the states that are holding back are less than honest - some of them probably feel that privacy is important. But when your state's already facing a budget deficit - as most are - yet another unfunded Federal mandate is going to get a less than warm reception.
And that's my biggest problem. When I'm on a long flight, I just want to read. I would much rather take a book and leave my tablet in the bag than wonder what I'm going to do in two and a half hours when the battery dies for good. Until they can get that little difficulty ironed out, I'm gonna stick with the dead tree versions...
Because they probably already have an iPod. They're just putting it to another use.
Um, look at the headline...
Could that possibly be because the majority of the people in the US speak either English or Spanish? If you look at local cable channels, rather than national networks, you start seeing shows in languages other than Spanish and English.
There are also a number of instructional videos that teach one how to play various musical instruments. Again, that's something you just won't see on American TV.
Yeah, but that's the difference between broadcast TV and the Internet. Stations have a finite space for programming and have to satisfy a majority of their audiences to keep the advertisers happy. I'm sure that they'd love to show, say, how to play the Aeolian harp, but nobody'd tune in and no advertiser would want to buy time there. Now, if people all of the sudden got interested in learning to play the Aeolian harp, they'd start showing up in CSI and you'd start seeing infomertials on harp-playing in the Sunday morning dead zone.
b) How 'bout if the person isn't qualified for the office (non-citizen, ex-felon, non-resident, termed-out, etc.)? Should the "people's choice" be elected anyway?
d)Hmmm. Rescinding votes. How far back can we go with this? If someone who voted for a bill that has already become law and rescinding that vote changes the outcome, will that earlier vote stand and, if not, will the law be invalidated? If you're from West Virginia, this'd be endless fun! Robert Byrd has been a Senator since 1958 - think of all of the legislation that you'd get the chance to review: the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and every other anti-discrimination law. The Americans with Disabilities Act. Sarbanes-Oxley. You could even vote to impeach President Clinton (he voted Not Guilty)!
No thanks, I prefer to have a bit more control over my destiny. When I last rented, the landlord raised the rent 4% per year (the maximum allowed in rent-controlled San Francisco) every other year. My house payment (which is tax-deductible, btw) will be the same in five years as it is right now.
And then my computer, video gear and furniture. And then any organs and limbs that I have two of...
Apple doesn't force you to buy their accessories - if you can find a better or cheaper item from Radio Shack, Belkin or somebody else that works with the iPod, Apple doesn't care (probably because they get a cut from licensing, but that's not important). If people want to have the Apple logo on it and are willing to pay more, so what? If the Zune sells well, there'll be third-party accessories for it too.
As to getting scratches, unless you keep it in the box, everything eventually scratches.
iPOD - It looks cool but is way over priced,
Yes, and so are Ferraris, and Corvettes, and sneakers that cost more than $50, and so are a whole bunch of other items that cost more than the sum of their parts. Regardless of their reason, the millions of iPod owners saw some value in it and were willing to pay the price. You didn't. Ok - there are other choices.
software is ultra-annoying for PC users.
If it is so annoying to PC users, why are they selling so many of them to folks with PCs? Most users don't care where iTunes puts the files just as long as they can find them. Yes, playlists aren't quite as granular as they could be - especially for videos - but I prefer them to having to remember which subdirectory that I put stuff that I'm looking for into.
And I'll tell you why:
Conspiracy theories aside, most local governments (who are the ones who actually run the elections) would have no problems giving receipts to users - when the technical and cost issues are ironed out.
Climbing the corporate ladder isn't the only way to grow. Try taking on new tasks that aren't necessarily within your job description - learning some of the business functions that you are supporting, for example - that show your ability to grow and learn. You may not make more money, but you are less likely to be on the short list in a layoff, it looks great on your resume and you don't have to "sell out".
Let's say that the US government decided that it was in society's best interest to develop this drug. After a couple of billion dollars of development and testing (they would still have to go through the FDA, right?), the drug turns out to have some fairly severe side effects and can't be sold. Now the original sponsors have to explain where the money went and why they decided spend the money in the first place. The next vote would be fun.
Or, let's say that the trials went well and the drug eventually made it to cancer patients - and turned out to be another Thalidomide. The lawsuits would last for decades and anybody who voted for it would be labeled as a killer - or worse.
Even if it does work, there will still be questions about why government decided to compete with private industry. Don't you think that the pharmaceutical companies based outside of the US would be very interested in why the US government decided to compete with them? In the best of circumstances, it's a no-win situation for everybody. Except, of course, for the cancer patient - but nobody really cares about them, anyway.
It's far easier politically to do nothing and complain about the rapacious pharmaceutical companies.
Besides, the only way Apple could be clearer on what they are doing is to put "WARNING! SONGS CONTAIN SCARY EVIL DRM!!!" in big red letters on every page of iTunes and prompt users twice when they download.
Apple gets more airtime with the non-geek community because the only thing that news loves reporting on more than pop stars getting arrested is large companies suing each other. iPhone doesn't exist yet - when it does, Steve can claim that iPhone was only a working name and call it whatever their marketing staff says will get people's attention.
Cisco, on the other hand, gets ink for a product that just about nobody has heard of.
Everybody gets publicity, no money changes hands, no foul called.
You opt out by not buying anything from iTunes.
The choice is never going to be as simple as: "DRM? click 'y' or 'n'". Apple has clearly said what can and can't be done with items purchased from their store. Nobody's forcing you to buy their stuff - if you don't agree, opt out by getting your music somewhere else.
Sealand hasn't exactly been recognized as a nation, let alone a member nation of the WTO, so anything that the WTO comes up kind of excludes Sealand, doesn't it?
Yeah, I hear that they're hiring at WalMart...
It's not quite as simple as that. Yes, the Democrats were successfully able to filibuster the nomination, but it never made it to a vote because the White House wasn't sure that they wanted to use all of their brownie points for one judge when there was certain to be a Supreme Court justice vote coming up. Pickering had just enough perceived skeletons in his closet to make a vote for him a bit worrisome to some Republicans.
Take West Texas or Kansas for example or even any number of closed or soon-to-be-closed military bases.
Most of the military bases, even though they are in lightly-populated states, are still in somebody's back yard. A lot of small towns have grown up around these bases for personnel that couldn't live on base and for civilians that worked at the bases. They all can vote.
On the other hand, Yucca Mountain is hundreds of miles away from anything else in Nevada. That doesn't make the folks in Las Vegas or even Reno a whole lot happier about having a nuclear waste storage site located in the same state as them.
The simple fact is that just about nobody wants one (or, if they do, they don't want one in their back yard...).
Overpriced by your and the GP's estimation possibly, but they seem to be selling well enough, no? I'm not particularly happy with the pricing structure myself, but you can't disagree with the market - when the buyer and seller agree on a price the price is fair. You or I may not be able to afford it, but lots of people can.
I'd be interested to know what you mean by this statement. When you say "quite the opposite", do you mean that telling a cashier to ask for a photo ID increases the chance of fraud?