If they do go through all the procedural moves and it comes down to it, it would end with a summary judgment with civil asset forfeiture. You don't get your $1.5 million, because you get their 1973 Pontiac and their 1955 mobile home that you and your federal marshals can't go onto the tribal land to take possession of anyway.
I would be interested in knowing if there is a laches defense or a statute of limitations for collecting on this kind of judgment as well. If she becomes indigent for long enough, I wonder if they can start garnishment afterwards.
>There was never supposed to be a major nasty punishment in law for noncommercial activity.
Oh?
Here is the main scenario that copyright law protects against:
You make a creative work. Let's call it a song. You commit that creative work to some durable medium with a copyright notice. You have a civil and statutory copyright on that song. I don't want to get into the complexities of this state, only to take as a given that the copyright exists and the song writer reserves it.
Now, some other party takes this song and calls it his own. He doesn't publish it, or use it in any commercial way at all. But he accuses you of copying his work, and he sues you for, let's say, $62,500.
Copyright is an extremely good defense in this situation -- in fact it is the most important defense that copyright law gives the content creator. But note that commercial use never has to enter into the question.
>Medicare? Medicaid? Social Security? Military? Anything else is a drop in the bucket.
All of them could be made more efficient, for significant incremental gains.
I would not cut the military, exactly. The radical move I would make would be to reduce the profit motive for industry in the military. If you want to be a defense contractor during wartime, you will take payment up to your operating costs (decided by the government, not the corporation), and compensation beyond this level will be in the form of bonds that are redeemable *after* the end of the war. This gives the people making the war machine a strong motivation to bring an end to the war. There would also of course be strict rationing of natural resources for the duration. Oh, and if the leaders of industry balk at the war scenario under my regime? The government *will* assume control, and such dissidents will be executed for their treason. They would certainly have no motivation to go to war for anything resembling an elective purpose. It would be the absolute last resort, and the big conservative industrial folks would be the FIRST ones in the anti-war effort, because war would force them to give up the things they acquire for greed, and contribute those things to the war effort.
>Do you think a fine of $62,500 per 99 cent song is fair and just and moral or not. (or even justifiable).
Yes, but only in a copyright case where a songwriter had the song taken by someone who published the song as his own, and then accused the songwriter of copyright infringement. In that case, I absolutely believe $62,500 and clear reassignment of rights would be perfectly fair, just and moral.
The problem is, copyright law does not really distinguish between the case I described (copyright's most important function!) and the one in the article.
Tribal governments will often bend over backwards to accommodate federal authorities. They will garnish wages for federal tax levies. They will hand over fugitives to marshals. I've seen both of those things happen. They will *not*, however, allow collection of environmental data, as I learned while doing university research for flood monitoring systems. Tribal governments will pick and choose the areas where they want to assert their autonomy.
More important than the abstract idea of what it costs to launch the shuttle, is "who gets the money?" and "for what?"
I have a feeling that if we actually *had* to put a shuttle up, and managed to keep things like corporate profits, individual compensation, and natural resource market costs out of the equation, it would be a lot less.
My PSAT score not only got me a full scholarship, it also got me completely out of my senior year of high school. I started college at age 17. The problems I had were: it alienated me from my friends (who had another year of high school), and it made me a lot younger than the normal college freshman (and I was socially awkward to begin with). At the time I was more resentful than grateful, but if I had it to do over again, I would.
Well, on day one they could revoke the blanket work visa they extend to the Nicas, and end their tax exempt status. They could also stop exporting food to them. The few wealthy people in Nicaragua would put pressure on their own government to work it out. They don't want to deal with refugees, with food shortages, or with having access cut off to their seaside villas.
When we go to war, one overriding and fundamental change should occur:
All industrial production, all natural resource extraction and development, and all labor in this country shall be devoted 100% to the war effort for its duration.
I'm not saying that the government should take over all means of production, but I am saying that no military contractor should be allowed to take any kind of profit beyond operating costs for the duration. They can be paid in bonds that are redeemable at the end of the war, but they certainly should not profit. Anyone who is engaged in any endeavor that is not directly part of the war effort should find themselves very unpopular for doing so.
If this sounds extreme, that's because it is. It should be the barrier that the government faces when it chooses to go to war, and it would provide the motivation for the entire country to end that war, and no profit motive for anyone at all for there to be any interest in artificially prolonging the war.
I find it disgusting that there is a "defense industry" that is based on greed, instead of a reluctant one that is based on desperate need.
From the instant we go to war, no person should be engaged in *anything* except the war effort, until that war is over. All commodities should be rationed. All industrial profits should be bonded for the war effort. And every able bodied man and woman should make it his or her personal duty to contribute.
If we have an issue that doesn't persuade the whole country to be willing to make that sacrifice, we don't have an issue worth going to war over.
They don't actually know they are opposing those things. They aren't thinking at that level of detail. All they know is that the plan equals "socialism" and that socialism is bad and must be fought to the last American standing. I'm serious. There are a lot of people out there whose only understanding of healthcare reform is that it's somehow going to send them into poverty for someone else's benefit. They don't think about enough or even know about it in sufficient detail to understand that they would agree with every single provision in the reform act if it had been penned by their own party leaders, which ironically enough, it substantially was.
If you go through the controversial health insurance reform act, you will find that Republicans support, item by item, the provisions in that act. The party leaders claim to want to repeal the whole thing, but they won't say directly that they want to allow insurers to drop children who develop asthma, or to take away the 35% tax credit that businesses get from the act, or going back to allowing the insurance companies to simply drop your coverage with no justification, notice, review or appeal, or the premium benefits for people aged 55-64 who want to retire early (a nice big chunk of the Republican base lives there!), allow lifetime limits that are far below a typical person's lifetime health care costs, accountability for rate hikes, and the list goes on and on and on, of things that the reform act does that are totally lost in all the rhetoric of "Repeal Obamacare". The Republican Party has successfully painted a very capitalistic, completely market-based system as "socialism" to a pretty broad spectrum of people.
Personally, it's the *absense* of socialism in the reform plan that upsets me. I wanted to see a system like the British National Health, and I would really like it to go much, much further than just that. I'd actually like to see the whole "health insurance" concept go away entirely, to make healthcare into *the* fundamental human right, and to fund the industry to the same volume that we currently do for the military. (And yeah, I'm saying, fund that industry *instead* of the military.)
>Wish more people would look into this. A surprisingly large number of people can afford to purchase a small plane.
And it's not all that terribly difficult to get a VFR license. I know a whole lot of people who have a private plane and a VFR ticket (I work in an general-aviation related business, where *all* of the execs and senior management are pilots.)
The thing to understand about VFR is that, yes, you can fly places a bit faster than driving, but you have to plan the day you fly and your route around the weather. To take it to the next level requires you to put in so many hours flying that you're a career pilot. To get to the threshold of flying private jets is way, way more serious.
Now, there are still a surprisingly large number of people who can afford to pay the depreciation on a Gulfstream and can afford to employ a professional flight crew. But that's a way smaller number than those who can afford a Cessna Stationair or a 180 or whatever.
Private flying can be really rewarding and can be a self-sustaining hobby or even a profitable endeavor, but do not underestimate the many hidden costs, and do not imagine that owning your own airplane and having your pilot's license means you won't be flying US Airways or Delta ever again. At best, it will expand your range for weekend trips and might be a huge boost to someone who does a lot of regional business. But flying will make you even more bitter about being at the mercy of the TSA and the parameters of commercial aviation.
When I travel with a firearm, I generally find the checking in process to be *very* efficient. When you check in a firearm, they want to very quickly do the check-and-lock, they get your boarding pass to you and you go to the front of the line and give the handlers your bag yourself. I've had a *far* easier time traveling with guns than with musical instruments. When boarding with a guitar I have *always* been subjected to extra scrutiny. When traveling with a gun, I *never* have been. I've never traveled with both, but I think I should try it.
I will remove my knee joint if you remove yours. You first.
Re:Python is the Lisp of the 21st century
on
Land of Lisp
·
· Score: 1
I guess I'm a lot more picky about the kind of work environment I will accept. I'm sure this means you have a lot more options than I do. I go to great lengths to avoid circumstances where architecture decisions were made in my absence.
I'm sure that I spent more hours playing Super Star Trek than I have all other games put together. I've ascended three races in Nethack and have 4 level 80 WoW characters, and I still think the trek game wins the time sink award. I still play a version of it, pretty often. Modding this game taught me a lot (but a lot of wrong things too) about programming.
Boehner seemed pretty hammered when he gave his speech. Three sheets to the wind.
To be fair, on election night for any office, win or lose, I'd have a bottle of Bushmill's down myself.
Re:"Alice" one of the best learning languages toda
on
Land of Lisp
·
· Score: 1
To expose students to the different kind of thinking that comes with functional programming, I'd rather use Haskell or XSLT than Lisp. I believe that functional programming is finding new relevance in applications for distributed processing. If I were putting together a comparative languages course, I'm pretty sure it would have at least one assignment where everyone has to come up with a job that is appropriate for map/reduce.
For Object Oriented programming in particular, I'd actually lean toward Ruby. I'd assume that everybody (in a 300-400 level languages course) knows C++, C# and Java, but probably not Ruby. And by Ruby, I mean Ruby, not Rails.
Re:metaprogramming FTW!
on
Land of Lisp
·
· Score: 1
>Sometimes people will add lots of copy and paste code to a codebase. We call these people bad programmers, and they tend to be fired.
I just finished very deliberately doing a copy-and-paste job on a service. Right now, these two services are extremely similar. But I know that they will be diverging in a significant way, and I have no interest in trying to do this with polymorphism or conditional logic. I realize this means that changes in one module will have to be tracked in the other, and that's a compromise I'm willing to make. The next person who touches this code will thank me, even if they think copy-and-paste programming is generally a bad idea.
Sometimes simplicity of a function is more important than re-use or versatility.
Re:Python is the Lisp of the 21st century
on
Land of Lisp
·
· Score: 1
Well, if you are in a situation where you have to use "whatever editor is available", I will suggest that you have put yourself in that situation, and you need to consider the reasons you've done so.
I cannot envision a scenario where I would be required to edit Python that didn't include VIM, which happens to be the ideal tool for editing Python code in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
If they do go through all the procedural moves and it comes down to it, it would end with a summary judgment with civil asset forfeiture. You don't get your $1.5 million, because you get their 1973 Pontiac and their 1955 mobile home that you and your federal marshals can't go onto the tribal land to take possession of anyway.
I would be interested in knowing if there is a laches defense or a statute of limitations for collecting on this kind of judgment as well. If she becomes indigent for long enough, I wonder if they can start garnishment afterwards.
>There was never supposed to be a major nasty punishment in law for noncommercial activity.
Oh?
Here is the main scenario that copyright law protects against:
You make a creative work. Let's call it a song. You commit that creative work to some durable medium with a copyright notice. You have a civil and statutory copyright on that song. I don't want to get into the complexities of this state, only to take as a given that the copyright exists and the song writer reserves it.
Now, some other party takes this song and calls it his own. He doesn't publish it, or use it in any commercial way at all. But he accuses you of copying his work, and he sues you for, let's say, $62,500.
Copyright is an extremely good defense in this situation -- in fact it is the most important defense that copyright law gives the content creator. But note that commercial use never has to enter into the question.
>Medicare? Medicaid? Social Security? Military? Anything else is a drop in the bucket.
All of them could be made more efficient, for significant incremental gains.
I would not cut the military, exactly. The radical move I would make would be to reduce the profit motive for industry in the military.
If you want to be a defense contractor during wartime, you will take payment up to your operating costs (decided by the government, not the corporation), and compensation beyond this level will be in the form of bonds that are redeemable *after* the end of the war. This gives the people making the war machine a strong motivation to bring an end to the war. There would also of course be strict rationing of natural resources for the duration. Oh, and if the leaders of industry balk at the war scenario under my regime? The government *will* assume control, and such dissidents will be executed for their treason. They would certainly have no motivation to go to war for anything resembling an elective purpose. It would be the absolute last resort, and the big conservative industrial folks would be the FIRST ones in the anti-war effort, because war would force them to give up the things they acquire for greed, and contribute those things to the war effort.
>Do you think a fine of $62,500 per 99 cent song is fair and just and moral or not. (or even justifiable).
Yes, but only in a copyright case where a songwriter had the song taken by someone who published the song as his own, and then accused the songwriter of copyright infringement.
In that case, I absolutely believe $62,500 and clear reassignment of rights would be perfectly fair, just and moral.
The problem is, copyright law does not really distinguish between the case I described (copyright's most important function!) and the one in the article.
Tribal governments will often bend over backwards to accommodate federal authorities. They will garnish wages for federal tax levies. They will hand over fugitives to marshals. I've seen both of those things happen. They will *not*, however, allow collection of environmental data, as I learned while doing university research for flood monitoring systems. Tribal governments will pick and choose the areas where they want to assert their autonomy.
>What kind of moron (much less twelve of them) could possibly turn out such a verdict?
It's easy for the juror. They don't have to pay the fine. They walk away with their parking waiver and don't give it another thought.
More important than the abstract idea of what it costs to launch the shuttle, is "who gets the money?" and "for what?"
I have a feeling that if we actually *had* to put a shuttle up, and managed to keep things like corporate profits, individual compensation, and natural resource market costs out of the equation, it would be a lot less.
1.3 Billion?
Ignoring the total cost of the shuttle program, and considering only the marginal cost per mission, I wonder if you could work out a better budget.
Hey, my UID is also prime!
I didn't know they still had the PSAT and NMSQT.
My PSAT score not only got me a full scholarship, it also got me completely out of my senior year of high school. I started college at age 17. The problems I had were: it alienated me from my friends (who had another year of high school), and it made me a lot younger than the normal college freshman (and I was socially awkward to begin with). At the time I was more resentful than grateful, but if I had it to do over again, I would.
Well, on day one they could revoke the blanket work visa they extend to the Nicas, and end their tax exempt status. They could also stop exporting food to them. The few wealthy people in Nicaragua would put pressure on their own government to work it out. They don't want to deal with refugees, with food shortages, or with having access cut off to their seaside villas.
When we go to war, one overriding and fundamental change should occur:
All industrial production, all natural resource extraction and development, and all labor in this country shall be devoted 100% to the war effort for its duration.
I'm not saying that the government should take over all means of production, but I am saying that no military contractor should be allowed to take any kind of profit beyond operating costs for the duration. They can be paid in bonds that are redeemable at the end of the war, but they certainly should not profit. Anyone who is engaged in any endeavor that is not directly part of the war effort should find themselves very unpopular for doing so.
If this sounds extreme, that's because it is. It should be the barrier that the government faces when it chooses to go to war, and it would provide the motivation for the entire country to end that war, and no profit motive for anyone at all for there to be any interest in artificially prolonging the war.
I find it disgusting that there is a "defense industry" that is based on greed, instead of a reluctant one that is based on desperate need.
From the instant we go to war, no person should be engaged in *anything* except the war effort, until that war is over. All commodities should be rationed. All industrial profits should be bonded for the war effort. And every able bodied man and woman should make it his or her personal duty to contribute.
If we have an issue that doesn't persuade the whole country to be willing to make that sacrifice, we don't have an issue worth going to war over.
They don't actually know they are opposing those things. They aren't thinking at that level of detail. All they know is that the plan equals "socialism" and that socialism is bad and must be fought to the last American standing. I'm serious. There are a lot of people out there whose only understanding of healthcare reform is that it's somehow going to send them into poverty for someone else's benefit. They don't think about enough or even know about it in sufficient detail to understand that they would agree with every single provision in the reform act if it had been penned by their own party leaders, which ironically enough, it substantially was.
If you go through the controversial health insurance reform act, you will find that Republicans support, item by item, the provisions in that act. The party leaders claim to want to repeal the whole thing, but they won't say directly that they want to allow insurers to drop children who develop asthma, or to take away the 35% tax credit that businesses get from the act, or going back to allowing the insurance companies to simply drop your coverage with no justification, notice, review or appeal, or the premium benefits for people aged 55-64 who want to retire early (a nice big chunk of the Republican base lives there!), allow lifetime limits that are far below a typical person's lifetime health care costs, accountability for rate hikes, and the list goes on and on and on, of things that the reform act does that are totally lost in all the rhetoric of "Repeal Obamacare". The Republican Party has successfully painted a very capitalistic, completely market-based system as "socialism" to a pretty broad spectrum of people.
Personally, it's the *absense* of socialism in the reform plan that upsets me. I wanted to see a system like the British National Health, and I would really like it to go much, much further than just that. I'd actually like to see the whole "health insurance" concept go away entirely, to make healthcare into *the* fundamental human right, and to fund the industry to the same volume that we currently do for the military. (And yeah, I'm saying, fund that industry *instead* of the military.)
Going between Phoenix and Portland has never had the slightest reaction, but I once heard a person in line behind me gasp when I opened my case.
"Have we seen another Pan Am 103 [wikipedia.org]? (Lockerbie, Scotland) Have we seen another Richard Reid [wikipedia.org]? Have we seen another 9/11?"
Would you say that is more a result of the TSA feeling your balls or more because they don't understand why your grandmother has a metal hip joint?
>Wish more people would look into this. A surprisingly large number of people can afford to purchase a small plane.
And it's not all that terribly difficult to get a VFR license. I know a whole lot of people who have a private plane and a VFR ticket (I work in an general-aviation related business, where *all* of the execs and senior management are pilots.)
The thing to understand about VFR is that, yes, you can fly places a bit faster than driving, but you have to plan the day you fly and your route around the weather. To take it to the next level requires you to put in so many hours flying that you're a career pilot. To get to the threshold of flying private jets is way, way more serious.
Now, there are still a surprisingly large number of people who can afford to pay the depreciation on a Gulfstream and can afford to employ a professional flight crew. But that's a way smaller number than those who can afford a Cessna Stationair or a 180 or whatever.
Private flying can be really rewarding and can be a self-sustaining hobby or even a profitable endeavor, but do not underestimate the many hidden costs, and do not imagine that owning your own airplane and having your pilot's license means you won't be flying US Airways or Delta ever again. At best, it will expand your range for weekend trips and might be a huge boost to someone who does a lot of regional business. But flying will make you even more bitter about being at the mercy of the TSA and the parameters of commercial aviation.
When I travel with a firearm, I generally find the checking in process to be *very* efficient. When you check in a firearm, they want to very quickly do the check-and-lock, they get your boarding pass to you and you go to the front of the line and give the handlers your bag yourself. I've had a *far* easier time traveling with guns than with musical instruments. When boarding with a guitar I have *always* been subjected to extra scrutiny. When traveling with a gun, I *never* have been. I've never traveled with both, but I think I should try it.
I will remove my knee joint if you remove yours. You first.
I guess I'm a lot more picky about the kind of work environment I will accept. I'm sure this means you have a lot more options than I do. I go to great lengths to avoid circumstances where architecture decisions were made in my absence.
I'm sure that I spent more hours playing Super Star Trek than I have all other games put together. I've ascended three races in Nethack and have 4 level 80 WoW characters, and I still think the trek game wins the time sink award. I still play a version of it, pretty often. Modding this game taught me a lot (but a lot of wrong things too) about programming.
Boehner seemed pretty hammered when he gave his speech. Three sheets to the wind.
To be fair, on election night for any office, win or lose, I'd have a bottle of Bushmill's down myself.
To expose students to the different kind of thinking that comes with functional programming, I'd rather use Haskell or XSLT than Lisp.
I believe that functional programming is finding new relevance in applications for distributed processing. If I were putting together a comparative languages course, I'm pretty sure it would have at least one assignment where everyone has to come up with a job that is appropriate for map/reduce.
For Object Oriented programming in particular, I'd actually lean toward Ruby. I'd assume that everybody (in a 300-400 level languages course) knows C++, C# and Java, but probably not Ruby. And by Ruby, I mean Ruby, not Rails.
>Sometimes people will add lots of copy and paste code to a codebase. We call these people bad programmers, and they tend to be fired.
I just finished very deliberately doing a copy-and-paste job on a service. Right now, these two services are extremely similar. But I know that they will be diverging in a significant way, and I have no interest in trying to do this with polymorphism or conditional logic. I realize this means that changes in one module will have to be tracked in the other, and that's a compromise I'm willing to make. The next person who touches this code will thank me, even if they think copy-and-paste programming is generally a bad idea.
Sometimes simplicity of a function is more important than re-use or versatility.
Well, if you are in a situation where you have to use "whatever editor is available", I will suggest that you have put yourself in that situation, and you need to consider the reasons you've done so.
I cannot envision a scenario where I would be required to edit Python that didn't include VIM, which happens to be the ideal tool for editing Python code in the first place.
>Of course it does - gridlock means that less laws get passed.
Gridlock means that less *federal* laws get passed. It also means that the states have more power.
Also in this case, the House controls plenty of things related to spending that don't have to go through both chambers.