As a matter of European law, all prices quoted must be inclusive of VAT (sales tax). The US price of 99c is, I believe, exclusive of applicable sales taxes, or sales tax does not apply.
Plus, credit card companies do not use the mid-rate when converting currency - you always lose a few pence each way.
I remember our school in London had RM Nimbus 186s (yes, they were sold in a few computers) with Hindi, Gujurati, Urdu and Punjabi wordprocessing - in 1989!
These computers were too basic even to run early Windows.
There are two things you need to remember about corporations:
1. They exist because they are legally entitled to exist.
2. They exist to make money.
Therefore, they will do nothing unless they are legally compelled to do it, or unless it will make them money, either now or in the future.
OK so 1 is true.
2 is arguable (given the existence of charitable corporations and that commercial companies have constitutions which set out their areas of operation). A better response is that a commercial company exists to provide shareholder value.
The primary difference here is between making money in the short term and providing shareholder value over time.
If a company's activities are illegal, they will be likely to lose money when caught.
If they are immoral, they may lose investors, and will carry a large regulatory risk. (The greater the level of risk involved in a stock producing a certain level of income, the lower its market price). More importantly they will lose customers (UC lost its entire operation in India).
If they are negligent, then when things go wrong they will be sued.
To the short-termist boss who is only looking to this year's profits and his bonus check, the value in the company to long term shareholders may be irrelevant. To the canny investor, avoid such bosses.
Unambiguously, yes. In addition to a reasonably well developed set of Health and Safety laws for a third world country, India has the usual common law system of damages for breach of duty of care, (the tort of negligence). It does not have US-style punitive or trebled damages, what is being sought here is merely the cost of putting people back into the position they were previously in, so far as the damage caused to them was forseeable by the company at the time.
The real problem here is with the corporate fashion for holding companies with large numbers of subsidiaries. As each subsidiary is nominally a separate legal person (notwithstanding, with 100% subsidiaries, the tendency for all to follow the topco's orders), the topco is able to avoid corporate responsibility.
For a start you are assuming that all homosexual infection is irresponsible, which is just insulting.
Further you are assuming that the "other/unknown" category is irresponsible.
Further you do not take into account the likelihood that the rate of HIV reporting among gay men is likely to be far higher than among the general population, because of the historic prevalance of infection in this group.
Further you do not take into account the fact that hetrosexual transmission of HIV is increasing.
How many jurisdictions currently tax Internet access?
The EU does - VAT, the only pan-European tax, is charged but some companies (including UK AoL) get round it by basing their operations in places like the Channel Islands.
we generally place the burden of proof on the person making the affirmative claim that something is happening
The heading of this discussion, to which you, with your oh so superior UID have posted so many silencing contributions, is "Is it a free market". I would ask you whether Adam Smith would have found a market, in a current situation of war and occupation, to be free. I would ask you whether that was a position likely to be held by the modern doyen of the liberal right, Issaih Berlin, but I've met him and know that not to be the case. I'd ask you whether the Cato Institute even would support such extremism, but know they wouldn't - even their website admits that that they do not expect free markets to extend to current warzones.
So I ask you, yourself, the simple question, if you had everything you owned destroyed, would you be entitled to a bit more of a break in life? Even if you don't, would you expect your new conqeurors to be entitled, by the law of the world, enforceable as against your country, and every country bar one, to prohibit you from doing what your ancestors have done for ten thousand years, to take the seed from their crops and replant them?
If WordPerfect Corporation (the company that owned WordPerfect at the time they started to lose their market share) really believed that they couldn't produce a non-buggy Windows version of WordPerfect due to insufficient info from MS, they shouldn't have released one.
Oh, yeah, 'cause that would have seemed a really good business proposition... "let's not try to write a good wordprocessor for the systems out there, let's wait, what 14 years, and sue the people who won't let us have their APIs"
Assuming that your figures for the excess vote over the exit polls are correct, there are at least four potential causes of the discrepancy.
Firstly it is possible that as you allege "the voice of the people was overwritten by fraud in this election".
Secondly it is possible that there is some inaccuracy in the raw polling numbers. The margins of error quoted by polls are margins for statistically predicted error, any systemic error made by the pollsters (for example in their arbitrary/random selection of districts to cover, or voters to ask) is necessarily an additional error factor. Systemic error occurs in nearly all polls to a greater or lesser extent - it may just take the form of pollsters being more likely to quiz people they fancy. Not to say the unattractive are more likely to vote Bush!
Thirdly it is possible that there is variance between what the voters are telling the pollsters and how they actually voted. The phenomenon of "shy Tories" has been observed by ICM, one of the UK's leading polling organisations and it may be that some Bush voters, for their own reasons, are more likely to lie to pollsters or to simply refuse to answer the exit poll than Kerry supporters.
Fourthly the exit polls quoted did not state the margins of error used, nor the distribution on which that margin of error was calculated. "probabilities calculated with SD=1.53 for 95% certainty level at +-3%" - this is very tight, far tighter than most exit polls I've seen. If the certainty level is 90%, the percentage gap +-4% or 5%, the picture looks very different.
Further, standard deviation is just that, a standard curve. There is no reason to expect that poll:election results will follow a standard deviation. The decision making process involves rational actors, whose decisions, and whose responses to poll questioning, will always in some cases be arbitrary and cannot be conclusively predicted from the actions of their peers.
A happy end note: the will of a free people can never be conclusively pre-determined, otherwise such people are not truly free. While the existence of an all-controlling God remains unproven, and quarks allow for randomness in the universe, I can still believe in freedom of action. Which includes of course the freedom to be wrong.
As the British health service is free at the point of use and therefore does not issue receipts, and one assumes no-one pays to be a Chinese soldier, the conclusion must be that the con-artists were returning unused railway tickets. Bizzare...
Indeed. Marks and Spencers in the UK have always until recently had the policy that they will take their products back without a receipt for an unlimited period. On the other hand, until recently they didn't take credit cards and didn't have changing rooms in most of their stores.
it is impossible for a private company to actually be involved in censorship
Editorial controls or policy of competing news organisations in a free market are difficult to call censorship. Where there are oppressive governments however, self-censorship by private sector organisations is often used to maintain government control of the news media whilst maintaining a veneer of respectability. Take Robert Mugabe's licensing of journalists and printing presses in Zimbabwe for example. There need not be government censors sitting in the news room for freedom of speech to be effectively squashed.
Another area where it would be fair to call "censorship" on a private company's actions is where it claims to act as a blind agglomerator or distributor of content but secretly edits content to suit a particular political preference.
Slashdot Mirror
As a matter of European law, all prices quoted must be inclusive of VAT (sales tax). The US price of 99c is, I believe, exclusive of applicable sales taxes, or sales tax does not apply.
Plus, credit card companies do not use the mid-rate when converting currency - you always lose a few pence each way.
>>the 186 (which was really only used in embedded environments)
Actually RM in the UK used 186s in their range of all purpose school computers. Cheaper than the 286s at the time, but couldn't run Windows.
I remember our school in London had RM Nimbus 186s (yes, they were sold in a few computers) with Hindi, Gujurati, Urdu and Punjabi wordprocessing - in 1989!
These computers were too basic even to run early Windows.
OK so 1 is true.
2 is arguable (given the existence of charitable corporations and that commercial companies have constitutions which set out their areas of operation). A better response is that a commercial company exists to provide shareholder value.
The primary difference here is between making money in the short term and providing shareholder value over time.
If a company's activities are illegal, they will be likely to lose money when caught.
If they are immoral, they may lose investors, and will carry a large regulatory risk. (The greater the level of risk involved in a stock producing a certain level of income, the lower its market price). More importantly they will lose customers (UC lost its entire operation in India).
If they are negligent, then when things go wrong they will be sued.
To the short-termist boss who is only looking to this year's profits and his bonus check, the value in the company to long term shareholders may be irrelevant. To the canny investor, avoid such bosses.
> Were these safeguards required by law?
Unambiguously, yes. In addition to a reasonably well developed set of Health and Safety laws for a third world country, India has the usual common law system of damages for breach of duty of care, (the tort of negligence). It does not have US-style punitive or trebled damages, what is being sought here is merely the cost of putting people back into the position they were previously in, so far as the damage caused to them was forseeable by the company at the time.
The real problem here is with the corporate fashion for holding companies with large numbers of subsidiaries. As each subsidiary is nominally a separate legal person (notwithstanding, with 100% subsidiaries, the tendency for all to follow the topco's orders), the topco is able to avoid corporate responsibility.
For a start you are assuming that all homosexual infection is irresponsible, which is just insulting.
Further you are assuming that the "other/unknown" category is irresponsible.
Further you do not take into account the likelihood that the rate of HIV reporting among gay men is likely to be far higher than among the general population, because of the historic prevalance of infection in this group.
Further you do not take into account the fact that hetrosexual transmission of HIV is increasing.
Rape isn't funny
Amnesty International don't think so
Neither do these guys
Nor does Human Rights Watch
A quarter of prisoners aged 18 to 25 claim they have been sexually assaulted while in custody
Amnesty International don't think so
Neither do these guys
Nor does Human Rights Watch
A quarter of prisoners aged 18 to 25 claim they have been sexually assaulted while in custody
Actually you could achieve the same result in one line in BBC BASIC:
10 IF [thing I care about] ELSE [output]
But your way is more elegant, and to pick up a memory location, avoids the need for an OSWORD call in a variable.
and Java is prior art to BASIC how?
How many jurisdictions currently tax Internet access?
The EU does - VAT, the only pan-European tax, is charged but some companies (including UK AoL) get round it by basing their operations in places like the Channel Islands.
did I just violate Godwin's "Law?"
No. You verified it.
I'd be stunned if Canada didn't have some sort of reciprocity for US patents.
I'd be even more stunned if Canada was prepared to enforce punitive damages for breach of that US patent though...
Johannes Vermeer did a better picture of Delft though
The heading of this discussion, to which you, with your oh so superior UID have posted so many silencing contributions, is "Is it a free market". I would ask you whether Adam Smith would have found a market, in a current situation of war and occupation, to be free. I would ask you whether that was a position likely to be held by the modern doyen of the liberal right, Issaih Berlin, but I've met him and know that not to be the case. I'd ask you whether the Cato Institute even would support such extremism, but know they wouldn't - even their website admits that that they do not expect free markets to extend to current warzones.
So I ask you, yourself, the simple question, if you had everything you owned destroyed, would you be entitled to a bit more of a break in life? Even if you don't, would you expect your new conqeurors to be entitled, by the law of the world, enforceable as against your country, and every country bar one, to prohibit you from doing what your ancestors have done for ten thousand years, to take the seed from their crops and replant them?
Oh, yeah, 'cause that would have seemed a really good business proposition... "let's not try to write a good wordprocessor for the systems out there, let's wait, what 14 years, and sue the people who won't let us have their APIs"
Nope, nopester.
Biannual (adj.) means every 2 years.
Biennial (n.) is something that happens every two years.
Assuming that your figures for the excess vote over the exit polls are correct, there are at least four potential causes of the discrepancy.
Firstly it is possible that as you allege "the voice of the people was overwritten by fraud in this election".
Secondly it is possible that there is some inaccuracy in the raw polling numbers. The margins of error quoted by polls are margins for statistically predicted error, any systemic error made by the pollsters (for example in their arbitrary/random selection of districts to cover, or voters to ask) is necessarily an additional error factor. Systemic error occurs in nearly all polls to a greater or lesser extent - it may just take the form of pollsters being more likely to quiz people they fancy. Not to say the unattractive are more likely to vote Bush!
Thirdly it is possible that there is variance between what the voters are telling the pollsters and how they actually voted. The phenomenon of "shy Tories" has been observed by ICM, one of the UK's leading polling organisations and it may be that some Bush voters, for their own reasons, are more likely to lie to pollsters or to simply refuse to answer the exit poll than Kerry supporters.
Fourthly the exit polls quoted did not state the margins of error used, nor the distribution on which that margin of error was calculated. "probabilities calculated with SD=1.53 for 95% certainty level at +-3%" - this is very tight, far tighter than most exit polls I've seen. If the certainty level is 90%, the percentage gap +-4% or 5%, the picture looks very different.
Further, standard deviation is just that, a standard curve. There is no reason to expect that poll:election results will follow a standard deviation. The decision making process involves rational actors, whose decisions, and whose responses to poll questioning, will always in some cases be arbitrary and cannot be conclusively predicted from the actions of their peers.
A happy end note: the will of a free people can never be conclusively pre-determined, otherwise such people are not truly free. While the existence of an all-controlling God remains unproven, and quarks allow for randomness in the universe, I can still believe in freedom of action. Which includes of course the freedom to be wrong.
PS your figures might also just be bunkum.
And to use it incorrectly; the United States of America does not have, and has never had, an established church.
The EU didn't have a stance on Iraq. Foreign policy decisions require unanimity.
The largest employers in the world are:
The Red Army
Indian Railways
The NHS
As the British health service is free at the point of use and therefore does not issue receipts, and one assumes no-one pays to be a Chinese soldier, the conclusion must be that the con-artists were returning unused railway tickets. Bizzare...
Indeed. Marks and Spencers in the UK have always until recently had the policy that they will take their products back without a receipt for an unlimited period. On the other hand, until recently they didn't take credit cards and didn't have changing rooms in most of their stores.
Please ignore this post, cancelling out accidental mistaken mod.
Suppose that shows a flaw in this blog...
Editorial controls or policy of competing news organisations in a free market are difficult to call censorship. Where there are oppressive governments however, self-censorship by private sector organisations is often used to maintain government control of the news media whilst maintaining a veneer of respectability. Take Robert Mugabe's licensing of journalists and printing presses in Zimbabwe for example. There need not be government censors sitting in the news room for freedom of speech to be effectively squashed.
Another area where it would be fair to call "censorship" on a private company's actions is where it claims to act as a blind agglomerator or distributor of content but secretly edits content to suit a particular political preference.