Embracing the degradation of standards and tolerating ignorance and stupidity is one of the best indicators of a truly fucked up, retrograde mentality.
The embrace and the tolerance are two indicators, not one.
You would improve the legibility of the sentence by delimiting the participle clauses with commas, particularly with regard to the repetition of the word "and". Embracing the degradation of standards, and tolerating ignorance and stupidity, are two of the best... etc.
Sorry, on what planet will Alesis want to sue someone for publicising a driver that OPENS UP A NEW MARKETSPACE FOR THEIR HARDWARE?
1) Make really cool hard disk
2) Prevent Linux users using our product
3) Profit!
I'd say that given Sony's generally agressive posture with regards to personal/individual fair use and copyright infringement, I think they could easily be characterized using words like "angry" and "vengeful." And regardless of the emotional component, it was certainly wrongful, willfull, intentional and without legal justification.
I would disagree - emotional characterisations of corporate actions designed to maximise the return on the monetisation of their assets are incorrect. Even words like "avaricious" are not right - Sony's officers have a contractual obligation to their employer to make Sony money. Implementing DRM to move value away from consumers and to Sony might well be described as fulfilling their contractual responsibility, demonstrating their personal integrity.
Whether it was wrongful has yet to be decided by a court of law. You and I can think it as wrong as we like - Sony just disagrees.
Wilful and intentional - what was their will and intent? Do you accuse Sony of having had mens rea while committing acts that are criminal under the laws of the United States? If so, which laws?
In the United States, people's actions (and corporations are people) are curtailed by the law, not permitted by it. "Legal justification" is a phrase that I understand as explaining why an act that is in one context seen as criminal is in this particular instance not so. What law prohibits Sony's actions, that they should need to cite some other source of legal justification?
No. England and Wales (and Scotland for that matter, despite the fact its a separate legal system) have an adversarial legal system. A fair bit of Europe has an inquisitorial one - based on the Napoleonic system. The US legal system is based on English law, unsurprisingly, as the lawyers in the former colonies knew about that one when they drew up the constitution.
You misunderstand the purpose of the system. It is as a revenue generator, with the possibility of enhancing road safety as a side benefit. The initial purpose of the system is to match against the national database of automobile insurers, to find any vehicles that are uninsured (a legal requirement in the UK) and fine the owners. Companion to that is to find cars over three years old whose annual roadworthiness inspection (the "MOT", Ministry of Transportation test) has expired, and fine *their* owners.
Additionally, the presence of these cameras along the motorway network will allow vehicles to be tracked and timed over fixed distances and to subsequently issue automatic speeding fines. The UK currently has in many areas replaced traffic police with speed cameras, which have the advantage of generating revenue, and the disadvantage of not necessarily reducing accidents (statistics are abused by both pro- and anti- lobbies). One of the major drawbacks of the current Gatso cameras is that their films require manual unloading, which both creates a significant maintenance overhead cost, and means that in busy areas the camera may run out of film, and thus miss charging opportunities. The digital ANPR system will avoid that issue: as well, it will cover the entirety of the motorway network, including areas of low traffic density and good visibility that currently lead to significant levels of speeding without accidents, which should be a revenue-enhancing feature.
Such automatic fines are accompanied by legislation which requires a vehicle's registered owner to disclose the identity of the vehicle's driver or face a fine and penalty points on their license equivalent to what would be incurred for a speeding conviction - the UK government has deemed that forcing car owners who were themselves driving to incriminate themselves in this way to not be a disproportionate violation of their human rights. There are court cases which will challenge this, based on rulings in the European Court of Justice which disagree, and which the UK has by treaty and Act of Parliament determined to supersede UK court rulings. The UK government is understandably anxious to prevent those court cases from coming to a conclusion.
Bah humbug. It's not copyright infringement, it's fair use. The lyrics are a small part excerpted from the work (which is both the lyrics and the music), and this app is non-profit and designed for reference.
Realistically, no bachelor's degree affects the job you get after a decade of experience. Possibly, a doctorate specifically in a technical field will, in specific areas like network routing where heavy theoretical mathematics is a bonus. But IMBSHO you'd do better to get a comp sci degree, and accept that your career will change several times over your working life.
Unless you get a graduate recruitment place (sometimes called the "milk round") with somebody exciting like Google or HP (labs), or someone with a good guarantee of incredible financial reward (CapGemini or a similar consultancy, maybe McKinsey), then just go get another job after you've been there two years. Don't stay longer than that. You should expect a significant raise every time you voluntarily switch jobs, so the key is to balance as many changes of job as you can with a resume that looks like you are a stable and valuable employee.
There's no need to get that defensive - after all, I just think that US administrations over the last century have acted on behalf of their constituents, which is the moral responsibility they bear upon being elected. Who else's interests should come before those whom they represent? That's the objection to ceding sovereignty to the UN, to allowing the ICC jurisdiction over serving US personnel - I think it's very hard to argue against, unless a representative is elected on a platform that commits to serving foreigners as well as the electorate. If your response is to resort to ad hominem attacks, it suggests that your position is the one lacking merit.
The "freedom of the European continent" is a sweeping generalization. To play Devil's Advocate, the freedom of the Europe is due to the tardy actions of the pre-war French and British governments, who actually finally abandoned appeasement and declared war on Germany in support of Poland. The United States did not. Roosevelt was de jure constrained by the Neutrality Acts from taking a side until Germany declared war on the US after Pearl Harbor, and de facto from siding with the British Empire, the primary geopolitical competitor to the US. Prewar Annapolis wargames paid equal attention to war with the Japanese in the Pacific and the British in the Atlantic. From a strategic viewpoint, the result of the war was to reduce these two empires to client states, one occupied and the other burdened by massive debt, that largely served as unsinkable aircraft carriers for the Cold War. If Germany had not declared war on the United States, would Roosevelt have been able to intervene in Europe at all, with a war to fight in the Pacific?
No country has a proven track record of supporting other people's freedoms over the past 100 years. Consider the US policy towards governments in Central and South America. The allies that were supported - Batista in Cuba, El Salvador, Peron and the later junta in Argentina, Pinochet in Chile - and the popularly elected governments that were acted against - Allende in Chile, the Sandinistas in Nicaraugua - the US has largely been for stability and anticommunism, even at a high cost in freedom and oppression. Consider the regimes that were supported in South Vietnam 1955-75. Consider the US's willingness to act against Mugabe in Zimbabwe, or the military regime in Myanmar.
The US governments of the time have acted with the best interests of the segments of the US that supported the election of that government at heart. The US is just not that special.
The thing is, if the US insists on retaining control of ICANN etc, then it just pushes other countries to put something else in place that will not be subject to influence from the US alone. From a Euro/Russo/Sino/Pacific point of view, better to get some other collective and pseudo-independent body in place to manage things, and derogate from the US control - when the US government does not have any responsibility to act for the benefit of all internet users. China and the former Soviet republics benefit from business practices that are illegal under US IP laws. If the US government were to bow to lobbying from the entertainment industry and press ICANN to reform IP (the protocol) to make it more difficult for those business practices to take place, those governments have no influence over the decision that affects their countries. Enlightened self-interest alone demands that those governments seek some control over decisions that affect their economies.
You're being a little unfair. Have you forgotten the USS Cole? The previous bomb on the WTC? At some point, some major terrorist attack on the US was going to succeed, and the sitting president would have the choice of being either The Great War Leader Fighting to Preserve the American Way of Life, or The Guy on Whose Watch 3000 US Citizens Were Murdered by 20 Guys with Knives for Peeling Fruit While He Sat Around with His Thumb Up His Ass.
In the Cold War, the CIA set up lots of proxy agents against the Soviets' proxy agents - Nung and Montagnards in Southeast Asia, the Bay of Pigs, the Contras, the whole El Salvador deathsquad thing, Pinochet for Allende - and in Afghanistan, the easiest way to motivate the locals against Najibullah was with religion - secular Marxism vs populist Islam.
As it happened, populist Islam's relation with the US was not very tight. From an Islamist viewpoint, secular conservatives like Cheney and Wolfowitz are no better or worse than what passes for "liberals" in the US really, but their alliance with conservative Christians, exemplified by Ashcroft, to achieve Republican poll victory, forces the neocons to adopt positions that play into the hands of Al-Qaeda.
I'd say that it's at least as true to say that the Bush administration is a godsend for OBL - an enemy who believes in colonial occupations, cultural imperialism, unilateral militarism, and pre-emption as a doctrine - it's so EASY for anyone outside the US to point a finger and say "George W is the Bad Guy! We just want to live our lives alone, but he insists on profaning our lands with his soldier's boots, on defiling our holy books, on forcing us to buy his nation's goods and services, on making us obey his contributors' IP laws. He is evil, and wants to enslave us to profit his own people like they did to the Africans before! We must fight, and if necessary die, for they can take away our lives, but they'll never take away our freedom!" If all you wanted was to unite Arabs and Muslims, despite their religious heterodoxies and their disparate cultures, you'd be hard pressed to find a better candidate.
An abortion is a trauma whose effects stay with the woman who goes through it for the rest of her life - and those effects ripple out to touch all those who either support or turn away from her. Much like... having a child, and needing to shoulder the responsibility of parenthood for the rest of your life. Weird, isn't it?
If religion is allowed in public schools, how do you feel about your children being required to conform to the behaviour of the faith that funds Public High School #1067? If, say the school uniform that your daughter is required to wear to attend, includes a headscarf, and the Pledge was followed by the prayer "There is no God but the One God, and Mohammed is His Prophet"?
"Leak?"
"Yes, minister, it's one of those irregular verbs. You know, *I* hold a confidential press conference, *you* leak, *he's* been charged under section 2 of the Official Secrets Act..."
If the FBI (for example) has to seek a court order from a judge to get an ISP to monitor your web use for them, there is an audit trail that can be used to expose, stop, and punish misuse of that information - for commercial gain, for partisan political benefit, for personal misuse.
If there is always a backdoor that some government arm can use without getting an impartial court to force the ISP to assist, then who is to know if such abuses take place? If the government you elect is not accountable for its actions, why shouldn't it's actions include removing the possibility of being unelected? Note, I don't have a partisan axe to grind - I'm sure there are plenty of examples of corruption by both major parties.
RTFA. "[HP] said it was the victim of a scheme run by an employee of Defence and others.
One employee of Defence was fired and is now living in the Turks and Caicos.
...HP said there was no evidence that its employees derived any benefit from the scheme."
The article and its predecessor state that HP claims that it was acting as the programme manager for a number of subcontractors, one or more of whom allegedly colluded with a civil servant to submit fraudulent invoices, which HP then passed on to the Ottawa government.
HP is not going after its own employees, as it claims that none of them profited from the scam.
Corporate immunity is something of a given, BTW. If a corporate officer is sued for their actions in their corporate capacity, the corporation tends to foot the bill through its liability insurance - you won't get a penny from the individual themselves.
You won't find a political organisation that fights for the Constitution, because it is inherently opposed to political organisations.
The Constitution was basically written to denote the limitations that its framers felt should be applied to the government. They had been party to treason, rebellion, secession, and civil war prior to winning independence, and wanted to make sure that the government they created would not behave towards its citizens in the way Britain had - in essence, to avoid the necessity for future civil strife.
Pressure groups, special interest groups, and political parties all seek to use the apparatus of government to extend the rights and powers of their supporters at the expense of everyone else. That's their purpose. Which means that an instrument that limits the powers and rights available through the apparatus of government, is anathema to them.
Fahrenheit was rather arbitrary in defining his scale -
0F is the triple point of a mix of 4parts water to 1 part salt (or something like that).
100F is a horse's body temperature.
20/20 hindsight.
The only test of their stupidity, or sloppiness, is the skyline of Manhattan. They evaded the measures in place to catch them, and they flew planes into the World Trade Center. Why do you believe that people willing to do that, would not equally find ways to circumvent better systems?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, if you were the plaintiff, you would take a hint as to how serious he felt your case was?
The embrace and the tolerance are two indicators, not one.
You would improve the legibility of the sentence by delimiting the participle clauses with commas, particularly with regard to the repetition of the word "and".
Embracing the degradation of standards, and tolerating ignorance and stupidity, are two of the best... etc.
Sorry, on what planet will Alesis want to sue someone for publicising a driver that OPENS UP A NEW MARKETSPACE FOR THEIR HARDWARE? 1) Make really cool hard disk 2) Prevent Linux users using our product 3) Profit!
I would disagree - emotional characterisations of corporate actions designed to maximise the return on the monetisation of their assets are incorrect. Even words like "avaricious" are not right - Sony's officers have a contractual obligation to their employer to make Sony money. Implementing DRM to move value away from consumers and to Sony might well be described as fulfilling their contractual responsibility, demonstrating their personal integrity.
Whether it was wrongful has yet to be decided by a court of law. You and I can think it as wrong as we like - Sony just disagrees.
Wilful and intentional - what was their will and intent? Do you accuse Sony of having had mens rea while committing acts that are criminal under the laws of the United States? If so, which laws?
In the United States, people's actions (and corporations are people) are curtailed by the law, not permitted by it. "Legal justification" is a phrase that I understand as explaining why an act that is in one context seen as criminal is in this particular instance not so. What law prohibits Sony's actions, that they should need to cite some other source of legal justification?
No.
England and Wales (and Scotland for that matter, despite the fact its a separate legal system) have an adversarial legal system. A fair bit of Europe has an inquisitorial one - based on the Napoleonic system. The US legal system is based on English law, unsurprisingly, as the lawyers in the former colonies knew about that one when they drew up the constitution.
You misunderstand the purpose of the system. It is as a revenue generator, with the possibility of enhancing road safety as a side benefit. The initial purpose of the system is to match against the national database of automobile insurers, to find any vehicles that are uninsured (a legal requirement in the UK) and fine the owners. Companion to that is to find cars over three years old whose annual roadworthiness inspection (the "MOT", Ministry of Transportation test) has expired, and fine *their* owners.
Additionally, the presence of these cameras along the motorway network will allow vehicles to be tracked and timed over fixed distances and to subsequently issue automatic speeding fines. The UK currently has in many areas replaced traffic police with speed cameras, which have the advantage of generating revenue, and the disadvantage of not necessarily reducing accidents (statistics are abused by both pro- and anti- lobbies). One of the major drawbacks of the current Gatso cameras is that their films require manual unloading, which both creates a significant maintenance overhead cost, and means that in busy areas the camera may run out of film, and thus miss charging opportunities. The digital ANPR system will avoid that issue: as well, it will cover the entirety of the motorway network, including areas of low traffic density and good visibility that currently lead to significant levels of speeding without accidents, which should be a revenue-enhancing feature.
Such automatic fines are accompanied by legislation which requires a vehicle's registered owner to disclose the identity of the vehicle's driver or face a fine and penalty points on their license equivalent to what would be incurred for a speeding conviction - the UK government has deemed that forcing car owners who were themselves driving to incriminate themselves in this way to not be a disproportionate violation of their human rights. There are court cases which will challenge this, based on rulings in the European Court of Justice which disagree, and which the UK has by treaty and Act of Parliament determined to supersede UK court rulings. The UK government is understandably anxious to prevent those court cases from coming to a conclusion.
Where is this suit taking place? I couldn't find a record of it in the Hamilton County court website.
Bah humbug. It's not copyright infringement, it's fair use. The lyrics are a small part excerpted from the work (which is both the lyrics and the music), and this app is non-profit and designed for reference.
Surely that't only the case if the teller is a married woman - the question specifies kits, cats, sacks, and wives.
Realistically, no bachelor's degree affects the job you get after a decade of experience. Possibly, a doctorate specifically in a technical field will, in specific areas like network routing where heavy theoretical mathematics is a bonus. But IMBSHO you'd do better to get a comp sci degree, and accept that your career will change several times over your working life.
Unless you get a graduate recruitment place (sometimes called the "milk round") with somebody exciting like Google or HP (labs), or someone with a good guarantee of incredible financial reward (CapGemini or a similar consultancy, maybe McKinsey), then just go get another job after you've been there two years.
Don't stay longer than that. You should expect a significant raise every time you voluntarily switch jobs, so the key is to balance as many changes of job as you can with a resume that looks like you are a stable and valuable employee.
There's no need to get that defensive - after all, I just think that US administrations over the last century have acted on behalf of their constituents, which is the moral responsibility they bear upon being elected. Who else's interests should come before those whom they represent? That's the objection to ceding sovereignty to the UN, to allowing the ICC jurisdiction over serving US personnel - I think it's very hard to argue against, unless a representative is elected on a platform that commits to serving foreigners as well as the electorate. If your response is to resort to ad hominem attacks, it suggests that your position is the one lacking merit.
The "freedom of the European continent" is a sweeping generalization. To play Devil's Advocate, the freedom of the Europe is due to the tardy actions of the pre-war French and British governments, who actually finally abandoned appeasement and declared war on Germany in support of Poland. The United States did not. Roosevelt was de jure constrained by the Neutrality Acts from taking a side until Germany declared war on the US after Pearl Harbor, and de facto from siding with the British Empire, the primary geopolitical competitor to the US. Prewar Annapolis wargames paid equal attention to war with the Japanese in the Pacific and the British in the Atlantic. From a strategic viewpoint, the result of the war was to reduce these two empires to client states, one occupied and the other burdened by massive debt, that largely served as unsinkable aircraft carriers for the Cold War. If Germany had not declared war on the United States, would Roosevelt have been able to intervene in Europe at all, with a war to fight in the Pacific?
No country has a proven track record of supporting other people's freedoms over the past 100 years.
Consider the US policy towards governments in Central and South America. The allies that were supported - Batista in Cuba, El Salvador, Peron and the later junta in Argentina, Pinochet in Chile - and the popularly elected governments that were acted against - Allende in Chile, the Sandinistas in Nicaraugua - the US has largely been for stability and anticommunism, even at a high cost in freedom and oppression.
Consider the regimes that were supported in South Vietnam 1955-75.
Consider the US's willingness to act against Mugabe in Zimbabwe, or the military regime in Myanmar.
The US governments of the time have acted with the best interests of the segments of the US that supported the election of that government at heart. The US is just not that special.
The thing is, if the US insists on retaining control of ICANN etc, then it just pushes other countries to put something else in place that will not be subject to influence from the US alone. From a Euro/Russo/Sino/Pacific point of view, better to get some other collective and pseudo-independent body in place to manage things, and derogate from the US control - when the US government does not have any responsibility to act for the benefit of all internet users. China and the former Soviet republics benefit from business practices that are illegal under US IP laws. If the US government were to bow to lobbying from the entertainment industry and press ICANN to reform IP (the protocol) to make it more difficult for those business practices to take place, those governments have no influence over the decision that affects their countries. Enlightened self-interest alone demands that those governments seek some control over decisions that affect their economies.
You're being a little unfair. Have you forgotten the USS Cole? The previous bomb on the WTC? At some point, some major terrorist attack on the US was going to succeed, and the sitting president would have the choice of being either The Great War Leader Fighting to Preserve the American Way of Life, or The Guy on Whose Watch 3000 US Citizens Were Murdered by 20 Guys with Knives for Peeling Fruit While He Sat Around with His Thumb Up His Ass.
In the Cold War, the CIA set up lots of proxy agents against the Soviets' proxy agents - Nung and Montagnards in Southeast Asia, the Bay of Pigs, the Contras, the whole El Salvador deathsquad thing, Pinochet for Allende - and in Afghanistan, the easiest way to motivate the locals against Najibullah was with religion - secular Marxism vs populist Islam.
As it happened, populist Islam's relation with the US was not very tight. From an Islamist viewpoint, secular conservatives like Cheney and Wolfowitz are no better or worse than what passes for "liberals" in the US really, but their alliance with conservative Christians, exemplified by Ashcroft, to achieve Republican poll victory, forces the neocons to adopt positions that play into the hands of Al-Qaeda.
I'd say that it's at least as true to say that the Bush administration is a godsend for OBL - an enemy who believes in colonial occupations, cultural imperialism, unilateral militarism, and pre-emption as a doctrine - it's so EASY for anyone outside the US to point a finger and say "George W is the Bad Guy! We just want to live our lives alone, but he insists on profaning our lands with his soldier's boots, on defiling our holy books, on forcing us to buy his nation's goods and services, on making us obey his contributors' IP laws. He is evil, and wants to enslave us to profit his own people like they did to the Africans before! We must fight, and if necessary die, for they can take away our lives, but they'll never take away our freedom!" If all you wanted was to unite Arabs and Muslims, despite their religious heterodoxies and their disparate cultures, you'd be hard pressed to find a better candidate.
An abortion is a trauma whose effects stay with the woman who goes through it for the rest of her life - and those effects ripple out to touch all those who either support or turn away from her. Much like... having a child, and needing to shoulder the responsibility of parenthood for the rest of your life. Weird, isn't it?
If religion is allowed in public schools, how do you feel about your children being required to conform to the behaviour of the faith that funds Public High School #1067? If, say the school uniform that your daughter is required to wear to attend, includes a headscarf, and the Pledge was followed by the prayer "There is no God but the One God, and Mohammed is His Prophet"?
"Leak?" "Yes, minister, it's one of those irregular verbs. You know, *I* hold a confidential press conference, *you* leak, *he's* been charged under section 2 of the Official Secrets Act..."
Transparency in government and law enforcement.
If the FBI (for example) has to seek a court order from a judge to get an ISP to monitor your web use for them, there is an audit trail that can be used to expose, stop, and punish misuse of that information - for commercial gain, for partisan political benefit, for personal misuse.
If there is always a backdoor that some government arm can use without getting an impartial court to force the ISP to assist, then who is to know if such abuses take place? If the government you elect is not accountable for its actions, why shouldn't it's actions include removing the possibility of being unelected? Note, I don't have a partisan axe to grind - I'm sure there are plenty of examples of corruption by both major parties.
Anakin does bring balance to the force. He wipes out the Jedi, then he wipes out the Sith. Everybody is dead, but equal.
"[HP] said it was the victim of a scheme run by an employee of Defence and others.
One employee of Defence was fired and is now living in the Turks and Caicos.
The article and its predecessor state that HP claims that it was acting as the programme manager for a number of subcontractors, one or more of whom allegedly colluded with a civil servant to submit fraudulent invoices, which HP then passed on to the Ottawa government.
HP is not going after its own employees, as it claims that none of them profited from the scam.
Corporate immunity is something of a given, BTW. If a corporate officer is sued for their actions in their corporate capacity, the corporation tends to foot the bill through its liability insurance - you won't get a penny from the individual themselves.
You won't find a political organisation that fights for the Constitution, because it is inherently opposed to political organisations.
The Constitution was basically written to denote the limitations that its framers felt should be applied to the government. They had been party to treason, rebellion, secession, and civil war prior to winning independence, and wanted to make sure that the government they created would not behave towards its citizens in the way Britain had - in essence, to avoid the necessity for future civil strife.
Pressure groups, special interest groups, and political parties all seek to use the apparatus of government to extend the rights and powers of their supporters at the expense of everyone else. That's their purpose. Which means that an instrument that limits the powers and rights available through the apparatus of government, is anathema to them.
Fahrenheit was rather arbitrary in defining his scale - 0F is the triple point of a mix of 4parts water to 1 part salt (or something like that). 100F is a horse's body temperature.
20/20 hindsight. The only test of their stupidity, or sloppiness, is the skyline of Manhattan. They evaded the measures in place to catch them, and they flew planes into the World Trade Center. Why do you believe that people willing to do that, would not equally find ways to circumvent better systems?