"So if I invented a magical cure which fixed all known diseases then I suppose I would be irresponsible because I'm putting all those medical professionals out of a job?"
Well, if your invention is truly "magical", then not only the medical folks, but the whole scientific community is going to have some explaining to do, as will religious leaders.
If your invention is not magical, well, major discoveries have been made before, and the world has gone on.
"The less labor needed for housing contruction (or any other particular task), the more people are available to do other work (net effect: more wealth in the economy)."
Unless of course, there is no demand for their labor, thus no "other work" for them to do.
"So, a cashier has to do jail time if they misidentify a counterfeit bill? "
No, if a store manager makes a false statement to a police officer or a judge, he should be liable for it.
I can't resolve this idea of "using a less common currency" as "being an ass", or any other problem.
Either it is legal currency, and it may be used to pay debts, or it is not. There is nothing in between, and nothing that justifies the events in the story.
"Thus, to sell my Windows, I would have had to sell the hard disk, and that would have been inconvenient. "
If you're talking about Windows XP, it would have been more than just inconvenient; it would not have worked. At best, it would have worked for 60 days and then Activation would fail.
" While he didn't deserve to be arrested, he wasn't exactly innocent: "
Not guilty of a crime is, precisely and exactly, "innocent."
Your ethos may allow for gray areas, but we're talking about laws, police, handcuffs, jails, statements made by managers to the authorities, and the obligations of a creditor (disclosure, legal tender) here.
Your bazooka example might be different. If you make a reasonble person reasonably believe that his life or property is in danger, in some situations, you have committed aggravated assault (what you did would be a felony in Arizona), and you may even have given him the justification for the use of force to stop you.
"Legal tender. Lets think carefully of those two words. Um... nope, don't give up any rights when using $2 bills."
They don't confer as many rights as you seem to believe. Specifically, they do not empower the customer to demand to make a purchase, and they do not compel a merchant to accept them, except in the narrowly constrained case of payment of a debt.
If I go to a lunch counter, order a taco, the cashier asks for $1.00, they can refuse to accept a $50, or a $2 bill, or anything else. But if I go to a restaurant, sit down, order eat a meal, and am then given a bill, I've entered into a contract and incurred a debt, which does place certain obligations on the restaurant to accept my legal tender in payment of the debt, and in some places, refusing legal tender in payment of a debt is to be construed as the debt being forgiven.
"And the idiotic manager on down to the cashier should be FIRED!!!."
If he refused to accept legal tender for payment of a private debt, he should be required to forgive the debt.
If he made a false statement to a police officer that let to an innocent person being arrested and accused of a crime, he should be subject to charges of slnader, and of a misdemeanor charge of making false statements of a material fact to a police officer.
"But beyond that, their prices suck. Especially for cables."
And that's come about recently.
My studio has loads of audio cables that came from Best Buy a few years back. They are excellent cables, well made, from a vendor that is not carried at Best Buy because they've switched to Monster brand for everything, apparently. The cables I bought were relatively inexpensive, and they are just fine.
Today, I went into Best Buy with the idea of maybe buying a new Sprint phone. Well, the sales guy couldn't even tell me whether any deals were available for an existing Sprint customer who wants to upgrade his phone, and didn't have *any* PDA phones. I walked away, of course, and decided to maybe grab some DVD+R's and an optical cable. An $8.00 optical cable is $44.00 at that place, a $20 spindle of DVD+R's is $60.
Now, I have gotten some okay deals there, including a home theatre system, and some DVD movies, but that's because I exploit their sale prices and don't buy add-ons.
I didn't get a new phone today, but I did spend some money at Circuit City (probably not much better than Best Buy, but they have FAR better prices and seemed polite and friendly enough), and I bought some things mail-order (online, of course), for prices I would have paid in the store.
"As I recall US Federal law stipulates that failure to accept the US dollar to pay a dept is a crime.
I'm curious if the casher may face federal charges."
The lunch counter transaction isn't payment of a debt in a strict legal sense, so no. Not every transaction of commerce is payment of a debt, and the obligations placed on creditors to accept legal tender for private debts is rather specific.
So legal tender, a well-defined subset of "lawful money", may be refused by a merchant until a person is in debt. So you can put a sign on your store that says "No bills larger than $20".
The merchant can refuse to do business with the customer, and, equally important, the customer cannot demand to make a purchase.
So, legal tender for debts means precisely that. You choose to accept the money for other things, but the law requires you to accept it for payment of debts.
"They try to trick me into admitting to a crime I didn't commit."
When in police custody, the only words that should come out of your mouth are your name, and the words "Am I free to go? I choose to remain silent. I would like to speak to an attorney now."
They will try all kinds of things to get you to talk after this, including putting handcuffs on you, searching through your backpack, putting you in the car, even taking you to jail. But if they try too hard it works in your favor.
From the first moment that you reasonably believe you are not free to walk away from a police officer, stop talking until you talk to a lawyer or a judge.
If no demand is made for payment, and there is no reasonable basis to believe payment is due, there is no theft.
Turn that around and realize if it were otherwise, you could demand payment for services that were never agreed upon, at rates that were not negotiated or even disclosed.
"Does Best Buy owe this guy a million dollars for following best practices with regards to currency?"
It depends on who did the handcuffing, how it was done, and whether the detention or arrest was done as a result of a false or misleading statement made by a store employee to a police officer. If that was the case, the victim is due some restitution, and the person who made the false statement should do six months to a year in prison for it.
"Imagine how much energy would be saved with that!"
Not enough to be of sufficient financial impact to the owners/occupants of the building to compel them to do otherwise. Specifically, not enough to give a measurable competitive advantage for a company that turns the lights off versus one that leaves them on.
I think they should do it because it's the right thing to do, but I know that's not how it works. Bottom line is, energy costs are still too low.
While everyone seems to get upset about $50/bbl oil, I'm preparing for orders of magnitude higher.
Many more communting accidents happen in the pre-dawn hours. Also, the idea that crime is reduced (because "everyone" comes home from work during the early evening), favors people with conformist work schedules, and severely impacts people with sleep disorders.
If people want to adjust their work schedule they should be allowed to do that. Start coming in at 7 instead of 8, or whatever. But to make the clock change mandatory stinks like so much state control of the basic aspects of life.
A state getting an exemption from a federal law is exactly the kind of precedent that tax protestors love to hear about! So it *is* possible for a state to *refuse* to abide by a federal law! Gay marriage, marijuana legalization, and tax-free zones can't be far off now!
There's two kinds of people, those with a large storage room filled with spare PC hardware, and those without.
Scatterd on my worktable right now is enough spare crap to put together two AthlonXP 2600+/DDR systems with SFF cases, 120GB hard drives, and good AGP video cards, and there'd be enough left over to do it again with P3's and tower cases and cheap memory.
I have so many 100GB disks it's ridiculous. I have a whole file cabinet full of network cards. ISA stuff, including many boxes of ISA and PCI sound, network, and video cards, all got donated a while back.
And I have less stuff accumulated than most of my peers.
"There is nothing hard about building your own PC. Like a brilliant person once wrote, it only takes two tools to build a computer. The ability to RTFM and a phillips screwdriver."
I read that soon after I had to drill four holes in a motherboard to mount a Zalman cooler!
Thanks, and thanks Newegg, and thanks Fedex. I got a $40 ATI Card, no fan, and if there's a game that won't work no a 128MB DDR video card, I could care less:)
>They have a huge "worker class" who have no rights.
They have a massive population that continually chooses to endure their status quo. Most will defend the system, even privately. Americans have the idea that Chinese are generally an oppressed people, but relatively few Chinese people hold this opinion. If they *did*, they have the makings of the biggest revolution in the history of the world.
You don't remember the 1970s. Russia was a taboo subject, even schools failed to teach anything about geography or history there. The "cold war" was a very real thing, and had some significant impacts.
> Cuba...as far as I can see they've done nothing to > the U.S. apart from choosing to be a communism > country..
They followed an order from another country to aim armed nuclear missiles at Florida. That earned them a permanent spot on the blacklist. This is bad blood that doesn't expire. You don't aim a nuke at the East Coast and then say you're sorry.
Also, do you have any idea what lengths and what level of massacre Cuba went to while "choosing" to be a communist country? There were a LOT of people who objected to that "choice", and a LOT of them died for their trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
"So if I invented a magical cure which fixed all known diseases then I suppose I would be irresponsible because I'm putting all those medical professionals out of a job?"
Well, if your invention is truly "magical", then not only the medical folks, but the whole scientific community is going to have some explaining to do, as will religious leaders.
If your invention is not magical, well, major discoveries have been made before, and the world has gone on.
"The less labor needed for housing contruction (or any other particular task), the more people are available to do other work (net effect: more wealth in the economy)."
Unless of course, there is no demand for their labor, thus no "other work" for them to do.
"So, a cashier has to do jail time if they misidentify a counterfeit bill? "
No, if a store manager makes a false statement to a police officer or a judge, he should be liable for it.
I can't resolve this idea of "using a less common currency" as "being an ass", or any other problem.
Either it is legal currency, and it may be used to pay debts, or it is not. There is nothing in between, and nothing that justifies the events in the story.
"Sounds cool, but for most brackets this works out to be about a third of what you're entitled to."
I love the way people represent tax deductions as a one-to-one relation, or even as a net gain, or even as being worth the extra paperwork.
"Thus, to sell my Windows, I would have had to sell the hard disk, and that would have been inconvenient. "
If you're talking about Windows XP, it would have been more than just inconvenient; it would not have worked. At best, it would have worked for 60 days and then Activation would fail.
" While he didn't deserve to be arrested, he wasn't exactly innocent: "
Not guilty of a crime is, precisely and exactly, "innocent."
Your ethos may allow for gray areas, but we're talking about laws, police, handcuffs, jails, statements made by managers to the authorities, and the obligations of a creditor (disclosure, legal tender) here.
Your bazooka example might be different. If you make a reasonble person reasonably believe that his life or property is in danger, in some situations, you have committed aggravated assault (what you did would be a felony in Arizona), and you may even have given him the justification for the use of force to stop you.
"Legal tender. Lets think carefully of those two words. Um... nope, don't give up any rights when using $2 bills."
They don't confer as many rights as you seem to believe. Specifically, they do not empower the customer to demand to make a purchase, and they do not compel a merchant to accept them, except in the narrowly constrained case of payment of a debt.
If I go to a lunch counter, order a taco, the cashier asks for $1.00, they can refuse to accept a $50, or a $2 bill, or anything else. But if I go to a restaurant, sit down, order eat a meal, and am then given a bill, I've entered into a contract and incurred a debt, which does place certain obligations on the restaurant to accept my legal tender in payment of the debt, and in some places, refusing legal tender in payment of a debt is to be construed as the debt being forgiven.
"And the idiotic manager on down to the cashier should be FIRED!!!."
If he refused to accept legal tender for payment of a private debt, he should be required to forgive the debt.
If he made a false statement to a police officer that let to an innocent person being arrested and accused of a crime, he should be subject to charges of slnader, and of a misdemeanor charge of making false statements of a material fact to a police officer.
"But beyond that, their prices suck. Especially for cables."
And that's come about recently.
My studio has loads of audio cables that came from Best Buy a few years back. They are excellent cables, well made, from a vendor that is not carried at Best Buy because they've switched to Monster brand for everything, apparently. The cables I bought were relatively inexpensive, and they are just fine.
Today, I went into Best Buy with the idea of maybe buying a new Sprint phone. Well, the sales guy couldn't even tell me whether any deals were available for an existing Sprint customer who wants to upgrade his phone, and didn't have *any* PDA phones. I walked away, of course, and decided to maybe grab some DVD+R's and an optical cable.
An $8.00 optical cable is $44.00 at that place, a $20 spindle of DVD+R's is $60.
Now, I have gotten some okay deals there, including a home theatre system, and some DVD movies, but that's because I exploit their sale prices and don't buy add-ons.
I didn't get a new phone today, but I did spend some money at Circuit City (probably not much better than Best Buy, but they have FAR better prices and seemed polite and friendly enough), and I bought some things mail-order (online, of course), for prices I would have paid in the store.
"As I recall US Federal law stipulates that failure to accept the US dollar to pay a dept is a crime.
I'm curious if the casher may face federal charges."
The lunch counter transaction isn't payment of a debt in a strict legal sense, so no. Not every transaction of commerce is payment of a debt, and the obligations placed on creditors to accept legal tender for private debts is rather specific.
So legal tender, a well-defined subset of "lawful money", may be refused by a merchant until a person is in debt. So you can put a sign on your store that says "No bills larger than $20".
The merchant can refuse to do business with the customer, and, equally important, the customer cannot demand to make a purchase.
So, legal tender for debts means precisely that. You choose to accept the money for other things, but the law requires you to accept it for payment of debts.
"They try to trick me into admitting to a crime I didn't commit."
When in police custody, the only words that should come out of your mouth are your name, and the words "Am I free to go? I choose to remain silent. I would like to speak to an attorney now."
They will try all kinds of things to get you to talk after this, including putting handcuffs on you, searching through your backpack, putting you in the car, even taking you to jail. But if they try too hard it works in your favor.
From the first moment that you reasonably believe you are not free to walk away from a police officer, stop talking until you talk to a lawyer or a judge.
"Theft of service is a crime in most states."
If no demand is made for payment, and there is no reasonable basis to believe payment is due, there is no theft.
Turn that around and realize if it were otherwise, you could demand payment for services that were never agreed upon, at rates that were not negotiated or even disclosed.
"Does Best Buy owe this guy a million dollars for following best practices with regards to currency?"
It depends on who did the handcuffing, how it was done, and whether the detention or arrest was done as a result of a false or misleading statement made by a store employee to a police officer. If that was the case, the victim is due some restitution, and the person who made the false statement should do six months to a year in prison for it.
"Imagine how much energy would be saved with that!"
Not enough to be of sufficient financial impact to the owners/occupants of the building to compel them to do otherwise. Specifically, not enough to give a measurable competitive advantage for a company that turns the lights off versus one that leaves them on.
I think they should do it because it's the right thing to do, but I know that's not how it works. Bottom line is, energy costs are still too low.
While everyone seems to get upset about $50/bbl oil, I'm preparing for orders of magnitude higher.
"Do they actually believe that legislation can change the number of hours of daylight?"
They might. President Bush has claimed to be able to "move heaven and earth" in order to prevent a terrorist attack.
Many more communting accidents happen in the pre-dawn hours. Also, the idea that crime is reduced (because "everyone" comes home from work during the early evening), favors people with conformist work schedules, and severely impacts people with sleep disorders.
If people want to adjust their work schedule they should be allowed to do that. Start coming in at 7 instead of 8, or whatever. But to make the clock change mandatory stinks like so much state control of the basic aspects of life.
A state getting an exemption from a federal law is exactly the kind of precedent that tax protestors love to hear about! So it *is* possible for a state to *refuse* to abide by a federal law! Gay marriage, marijuana legalization, and tax-free zones can't be far off now!
There's two kinds of people, those with a large storage room filled with spare PC hardware, and those without.
Scatterd on my worktable right now is enough spare crap to put together two AthlonXP 2600+/DDR systems with SFF cases, 120GB hard drives, and good AGP video cards, and there'd be enough left over to do it again with P3's and tower cases and cheap memory.
I have so many 100GB disks it's ridiculous. I have a whole file cabinet full of network cards.
ISA stuff, including many boxes of ISA and PCI sound, network, and video cards, all got donated a while back.
And I have less stuff accumulated than most of my peers.
"There is nothing hard about building your own PC. Like a brilliant person once wrote, it only takes two tools to build a computer. The ability to RTFM and a phillips screwdriver."
I read that soon after I had to drill four holes in a motherboard to mount a Zalman cooler!
"I hear Congress is meddling with Daylight Savings Time - Leave it alone!"
DST isn't even a Federal law. If it becomes one, will Arizona be forced to implement it?
DST is horribly inconvenient for people with certain types of sleep disorders, or for anyone who has difficulty changing his schedule.
Thanks, and thanks Newegg, and thanks Fedex. I got a $40 ATI Card, no fan, and if there's a game that won't work no a 128MB DDR video card, I could care less :)
>They have a huge "worker class" who have no rights.
They have a massive population that continually chooses to endure their status quo. Most will defend the system, even privately. Americans have the idea that Chinese are generally an oppressed people, but relatively few Chinese people hold this opinion. If they *did*, they have the makings of the biggest revolution in the history of the world.
>America seems to not have embargoes on Russia?
You don't remember the 1970s. Russia was a taboo subject, even schools failed to teach anything about geography or history there. The "cold war" was a very real thing, and had some significant impacts.
> Because unlike China, Cuba is easy to bully around.
It required nothing less than a serious threat to nuke the island; I wouldn't call that "easy to bully around."
> Cuba...as far as I can see they've done nothing to
> the U.S. apart from choosing to be a communism
> country..
They followed an order from another country to aim armed nuclear missiles at Florida. That earned them a permanent spot on the blacklist. This is bad blood that doesn't expire. You don't aim a nuke at the East Coast and then say you're sorry.
Also, do you have any idea what lengths and what level of massacre Cuba went to while "choosing" to be a communist country? There were a LOT of people who objected to that "choice", and a LOT of them died for their trouble.