We had a similar problem with the Students Union at our University. I suspect that most SU's are susceptible to being hijacked by highly vocal extremists. Our were left wing, yours may have been different, but ours were lefties. Every year at the AGM the leader of what was the thinly-disguised communist society would propose 2 motions (and be seconded by his deputy) and his deputy would propose 2 motions (and be seconded by him). These 4 motions would easily chew up 2 hours between them with argument and counter-argument and lots of faffing around it all on topics on which a Students' Union need have no opinion. For instance, we had motions on:
Pulling troops out of Iraq (I didn't know that our SU had any troops in Iraq).
Banning Coca-Cola (despite the fact that it would not have been possible to do so because the SU was locked into larger contracts).
Seeking to ban Nestle products (for reasons which were never adequately explained).
(Ostensibly) campaigning to secure higher education funding, but which also tried to block the largest source of private HE funding
Now, at least I could see establishing a Union position on funding, but the others were just trying to twist a large organisation into lending its entire weight to his own private campaign (why does he feel the need to stop everyone else from buying Nestle? Does he feel incapable of resisting picking it up from the shelf and so wants the temptation taken away?). Now, the rules at my SU were that you needed a simple majority of a quorate AGM, where 'quorate' was 2% of the entire membership. In reality about 3% would turn up, but all he had to do was get a few hundred people to vote in favour of his motion and BAM! he had a 20,000 person students' union who he could say were all in favour of whatever his pet campaign was. I voted against the Coca-Cola ban, but it passed (by 2 votes), and my students' union, representing me, went off to the wider students' unions conference and tried to abolish Coca Cola in every SU in the country, because that's what our union 'wanted'.
for China's military to be 10 times bigger than Japan's, the Japanese military (including reserves) would have to be about 20 million - that's 10 times more than the United States can muster. But, well trained and well equipped count for a lot (vis. Germany vs Russia).
China would probably have a hell of a job to invade Japan (no chance of air superiority - the Japanese have no small quantity of F-15s, and the US has F-22s there), but anyone attacking China sounds like an equally difficult proposition - the Chinese just have too large an army to make an Overlord-style landing. The only option would be to pack troops into friendly countries bordering China and roll over the border once they were there, or pack them into nearby friendly countries which have countries who could be rolled over between them and China (which is generally a diplomatic faux pas). i.e. Russia is the only possible country in the first category (though I suspect that they wouldn't be up for it), otherwise there's South Korea (and rolling across North Korea would not be easy), Thailand (rolling across any of Laos, Burma & Vietnam - yikes!), India (rolling across Burma - the India-China border just isn't realistic) or Pakistan (cutting a small bit of Tajikistan, or generally rolling across Tajikistan & Kazakhstan).
In conclusion, no-one has any realistic prospect of successfully attacking China.
Of course, China knows this; they also know that right now, no-one has the forces, finances or stomach to start world war 3. In maybe 5 years time, the forces and finances will be less of a problem, and they'd have to rely on merely the lack of stomach for starting a war which will make WW2 look like a playground scrap. Unsurprising, therefore, that they have done this now. Or it could just be diplomatic posturing (more likely).
Although there's a bill in the pipeline to abolish the bastards entirely, and it can't come soon enough. That's the one class of people whose being thrown, destitute, out on to the street I have no sympathy for.
Ok, how about you spend it on precious metals and then fire them into space with a railgun? Or have it all put into a fund, and at the end of the year use all the money to buy as much antimatter as possible, and just let it annihilate?
Any other ideas for destroying wealth?
Or, better than destroying wealth (the world being skint enough as it is), any ideas about some worthy cause that absolutely nobody can be opposed to, and just give the money to them?
It occured to me that anyone would have a hard time explaining WHY they have several gigabytes of random-looking data files.
The best idea I've come up with is to leave them in a folder with some (legitimate) random number generators with accurate source code which will generate files the same size as your 'random' ones and which don't use a set seed (so it can't be proved that those files weren't generated with that RNG) and the Marsaglia test suite, and if anyone asks; you're doing research into pseudo-random number generation. Bonus points if you have the results of running the Marsaglia tests on your encrypted files in a spreadsheet in there and the skeleton of a paper about it. Also, leave some genuine random files (trial-and-error to generate genuinely random files which give similar test results to the encrypted files). Even more bonus points if you leave source to a program that you're 'developing' which would require large quantities of random numbers (monte-carlo methods, or somesuch) in a nearby folder.
Now, of course, saying that you're doing RNG work when you're not is technically lying, which could get you in more hot water if it's figured out, so I can't recommend doing that. What you don't want is to be in the situation of being asked to explain in the first place; what you want is for whoever looks at it to figure out for themselves that it's benign and wave it through.
The problem with ocean-dumping is that it displaces water (naturally, I haven't examind the paper to see wether that is addressed), which we've got enough problems with as it is.
My idea (which has taken me an aggregate of about 2 minutes to think of) is to grow fast-growing trees, cut them down, bury them in old mineshafts, fill the remaining space with sea water, seal & forget.
If you fill all the coal mines with wood, you fill the same volume of space as the coal you took out and burnt - coal probably has a higher carbon-density than wood, but then you're filling space that wasn't coal-bearing in the first place. And there are other kinds of mine which could be used.
The salt water preserves the wood and stops it breaking back down into carbon dioxide or methane. It also takes a small amount of seawater (ok, probably a negligible amount) out of circulation.
maybe bankruptcy works differently there, but here you normally get made bankrupt by someone else because they realise it's their only method of getting paid anything. And you have to pay £500 to get one, so people rarely make themselves bankrupt because they can't afford it.
Quoth the Wiki (on US bankruptcy): "With involuntary bankruptcy, creditors, rather than the debtor, file the petition in bankruptcy. Involuntary petitions are rare, however, occasionally used in business settings to force a company into bankruptcy so that creditors can enforce their rights."
If there's no hope of extracting boodle any other way, your stuff gets sold. If you want to say that the possibility of this happening means you don't own your property then fine, no-one owns any property (because debts can be created by taxes or court judgements), let's just scrub the word 'own' from the dictionary. Shall I call the Editorial Committee of the OED? Or will you?
I think his point was that leaving the innocent puchaser holding the bag was dumb. I agree that giving the property back and compensating the purchaser would be better than letting the purchaser keep the property and compensating the owner, but both are substantially better than the present system of giving it back to the owner and leaving the purchaser out of pocket, especially as far as I can see (in th UK) the police put a lot more effort in to tracing a stolen vehicle and siezing it back for the owner than they then put into trying to track down the purchaser's money & the actual thieves.
you owe money to the government, if you don't pay it, they take your stuff and sell it to pay your debt.
Don't pay any of your other taxes and you'll find your assets being sold, do you not 'own' those either?
How about when you don't pay your private debts; one of your creditors gets you made bankrupt and your stuff gets liquidated? did you not own any of that either?
If you don't pay your debts, your assets get sold to pay them. The only thing special in regard to the government there is that they can create the debts for you to pay (i.e. taxes).
if he has an employment contract, he's not 'at-will'. Unless it's some bizarre contract which specifies that with the exception of not badmouthing the company it operates like he's 'at-will'.
Absolutely, especially as the advice is to seek a meeting including a company lawyer. Their lawyer may well try to bully you into backing down (and will probably succeed) - they won't even try to bully your lawyer into backing down, because they know that if he backs down, he doesn't get paid.
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Isn't that because most of the people who are treated to his 'hospitality' also cease to have the privilege of voting?
We had a similar problem with the Students Union at our University.
I suspect that most SU's are susceptible to being hijacked by highly vocal extremists. Our were left wing, yours may have been different, but ours were lefties. Every year at the AGM the leader of what was the thinly-disguised communist society would propose 2 motions (and be seconded by his deputy) and his deputy would propose 2 motions (and be seconded by him). These 4 motions would easily chew up 2 hours between them with argument and counter-argument and lots of faffing around it all on topics on which a Students' Union need have no opinion. For instance, we had motions on:
Now, at least I could see establishing a Union position on funding, but the others were just trying to twist a large organisation into lending its entire weight to his own private campaign (why does he feel the need to stop everyone else from buying Nestle? Does he feel incapable of resisting picking it up from the shelf and so wants the temptation taken away?). Now, the rules at my SU were that you needed a simple majority of a quorate AGM, where 'quorate' was 2% of the entire membership. In reality about 3% would turn up, but all he had to do was get a few hundred people to vote in favour of his motion and BAM! he had a 20,000 person students' union who he could say were all in favour of whatever his pet campaign was.
I voted against the Coca-Cola ban, but it passed (by 2 votes), and my students' union, representing me, went off to the wider students' unions conference and tried to abolish Coca Cola in every SU in the country, because that's what our union 'wanted'.
in order of importance, 2, 4, 5, 3 & 1
Please elaborate in exquisite detail...
Does it matter? France is signed up to the ECHR, which requires them to operate on the principle of innocent-until-proven-guilty.
for China's military to be 10 times bigger than Japan's, the Japanese military (including reserves) would have to be about 20 million - that's 10 times more than the United States can muster.
But, well trained and well equipped count for a lot (vis. Germany vs Russia).
China would probably have a hell of a job to invade Japan (no chance of air superiority - the Japanese have no small quantity of F-15s, and the US has F-22s there), but anyone attacking China sounds like an equally difficult proposition - the Chinese just have too large an army to make an Overlord-style landing. The only option would be to pack troops into friendly countries bordering China and roll over the border once they were there, or pack them into nearby friendly countries which have countries who could be rolled over between them and China (which is generally a diplomatic faux pas). i.e. Russia is the only possible country in the first category (though I suspect that they wouldn't be up for it), otherwise there's South Korea (and rolling across North Korea would not be easy), Thailand (rolling across any of Laos, Burma & Vietnam - yikes!), India (rolling across Burma - the India-China border just isn't realistic) or Pakistan (cutting a small bit of Tajikistan, or generally rolling across Tajikistan & Kazakhstan).
In conclusion, no-one has any realistic prospect of successfully attacking China.
Of course, China knows this; they also know that right now, no-one has the forces, finances or stomach to start world war 3. In maybe 5 years time, the forces and finances will be less of a problem, and they'd have to rely on merely the lack of stomach for starting a war which will make WW2 look like a playground scrap. Unsurprising, therefore, that they have done this now.
Or it could just be diplomatic posturing (more likely).
Any UK lawyers know if there's a way to FORCE the police to get involved?
Although there's a bill in the pipeline to abolish the bastards entirely, and it can't come soon enough. That's the one class of people whose being thrown, destitute, out on to the street I have no sympathy for.
Ok, how about you spend it on precious metals and then fire them into space with a railgun?
Or have it all put into a fund, and at the end of the year use all the money to buy as much antimatter as possible, and just let it annihilate?
Any other ideas for destroying wealth?
Or, better than destroying wealth (the world being skint enough as it is), any ideas about some worthy cause that absolutely nobody can be opposed to, and just give the money to them?
Public cash burning?
It occured to me that anyone would have a hard time explaining WHY they have several gigabytes of random-looking data files.
The best idea I've come up with is to leave them in a folder with some (legitimate) random number generators with accurate source code which will generate files the same size as your 'random' ones and which don't use a set seed (so it can't be proved that those files weren't generated with that RNG) and the Marsaglia test suite, and if anyone asks; you're doing research into pseudo-random number generation. Bonus points if you have the results of running the Marsaglia tests on your encrypted files in a spreadsheet in there and the skeleton of a paper about it. Also, leave some genuine random files (trial-and-error to generate genuinely random files which give similar test results to the encrypted files). Even more bonus points if you leave source to a program that you're 'developing' which would require large quantities of random numbers (monte-carlo methods, or somesuch) in a nearby folder.
Now, of course, saying that you're doing RNG work when you're not is technically lying, which could get you in more hot water if it's figured out, so I can't recommend doing that. What you don't want is to be in the situation of being asked to explain in the first place; what you want is for whoever looks at it to figure out for themselves that it's benign and wave it through.
The problem with ocean-dumping is that it displaces water (naturally, I haven't examind the paper to see wether that is addressed), which we've got enough problems with as it is.
My idea (which has taken me an aggregate of about 2 minutes to think of) is to grow fast-growing trees, cut them down, bury them in old mineshafts, fill the remaining space with sea water, seal & forget.
If you fill all the coal mines with wood, you fill the same volume of space as the coal you took out and burnt - coal probably has a higher carbon-density than wood, but then you're filling space that wasn't coal-bearing in the first place. And there are other kinds of mine which could be used.
The salt water preserves the wood and stops it breaking back down into carbon dioxide or methane. It also takes a small amount of seawater (ok, probably a negligible amount) out of circulation.
Can I get a famous too, please?
5. Profit?
t's hard to control a free man who is innocent of any wrongdoing. He'll just tell you to fuck off.
Bingo! There's plenty of 'free' countries where his doing that will make him a criminal.
maybe bankruptcy works differently there, but here you normally get made bankrupt by someone else because they realise it's their only method of getting paid anything. And you have to pay £500 to get one, so people rarely make themselves bankrupt because they can't afford it.
Quoth the Wiki (on US bankruptcy):
"With involuntary bankruptcy, creditors, rather than the debtor, file the petition in bankruptcy. Involuntary petitions are rare, however, occasionally used in business settings to force a company into bankruptcy so that creditors can enforce their rights."
If there's no hope of extracting boodle any other way, your stuff gets sold.
If you want to say that the possibility of this happening means you don't own your property then fine, no-one owns any property (because debts can be created by taxes or court judgements), let's just scrub the word 'own' from the dictionary. Shall I call the Editorial Committee of the OED? Or will you?
because he got two pages of notes out of a single sheet of paper - one to be read using the blue lens, and one to be read with the red lens.
I think his point was that leaving the innocent puchaser holding the bag was dumb.
I agree that giving the property back and compensating the purchaser would be better than letting the purchaser keep the property and compensating the owner, but both are substantially better than the present system of giving it back to the owner and leaving the purchaser out of pocket, especially as far as I can see (in th UK) the police put a lot more effort in to tracing a stolen vehicle and siezing it back for the owner than they then put into trying to track down the purchaser's money & the actual thieves.
you owe money to the government, if you don't pay it, they take your stuff and sell it to pay your debt.
Don't pay any of your other taxes and you'll find your assets being sold, do you not 'own' those either?
How about when you don't pay your private debts; one of your creditors gets you made bankrupt and your stuff gets liquidated? did you not own any of that either?
If you don't pay your debts, your assets get sold to pay them. The only thing special in regard to the government there is that they can create the debts for you to pay (i.e. taxes).
I've never understood that - is someone fired 'for cause' not still unemployed and in need of food & stuff?
if he has an employment contract, he's not 'at-will'. Unless it's some bizarre contract which specifies that with the exception of not badmouthing the company it operates like he's 'at-will'.
Absolutely, especially as the advice is to seek a meeting including a company lawyer. Their lawyer may well try to bully you into backing down (and will probably succeed) - they won't even try to bully your lawyer into backing down, because they know that if he backs down, he doesn't get paid.
weight of lawyer: 200 lbs
Does that include the golf clubs?
Sorry, the only one left is here, and that's not in international waters.
why can't he delete the link from his website? That would kill new payments from all but the most determined of people.
If you don't like it, find a different hosting provider.
I think that's what he said he was going to do...
(or would do if he were their customer)