I'd been saying a bit more than that, but that's the core idea - if you remember the 60s and 70s, Marxists especially tended to like long wordy rambling documents where they can enjoy the sounds of their own voices/pens/typewriters, and the works produced by committees make sure that everybody gets to put in their own wrinkles on it, and that kind of extremism simply isn't made to fit into Twitter messages or SMS or even IM.
Yes, I've read it, a few decades ago. (Ok, more precisely I've read "Capital", I forget whose translation, because my German wasn't quite up to reading the original "Das Kapital", but the problems were the logic, not the translation. I think my German copy was Roman-type rather than Fraktur.) That's why I was specifically insulting it, in contrast to the Communist Manifesto which has problems but is really kick-ass writing. If the phrase "tried to read it" applies, though I'm pretty sure I did finish it, it's because it was laughably bad, and maybe I wasn't giving it the respect that such a seriously intended work hoped to achieve. Now that I've got the perspective of a couple more decades of looking at real economics and not just theoretical economics, it might be interesting to re-read it. Some of his insights into capitalists' needs to expand markets weren't totally stupid, but the whole Labor Theory of Value that was the foundation of the document is simply wrong.
I don't know the details of what you're trying to accomplish here, so I can't comment on the legality, but it sounds like you think there are some issues, and you _and_ your boss need to discuss it with your company's lawyer (if you have one.) And you need to explain to your boss that terms of service can be legally binding, and can have copyright issues, and also that web-based data providers not only change data formats enough that your lost programming time might cost more than buying the data you need, but also that they can look for automated scraping and hand you bogus results.
The robots.txt files were originally designed to tell robots to stop doing heavy-duty queries on sites that couldn't handle it, but also to keep outsiders (especially spammers) from abusing content. And your code needs to follow robots.txt, because many many sites have robot traps that do unfriendly things to unfriendly visitors ("Nice lookin' robot you got there - be a shame if anything happened to it!") - or do userfriendly things to them.
As you say, Marx was an idiot - but if you look at him and most "Marxists" of various sorts who follow him, they were really verbose idiots. Sure, Engels got him to fit the Communist Manifesto in a short, punchy document with memorable slogans, but Das Kapital or the Unabomber's 35000-word manifesto were more typical. And most of the Islamic extremists are really verbose as well. Twitter and text messages are simply the wrong medium for ideological extremists to use.
Twitter may be fine for tactical operational messages or for non-ideologicals like gangs - "Lets go kill the Haitians!" fits just fine. Marxists can at least use Twitter to say "Let's go get beer"; even that doesn't work for the Islamics.
Maybe the white-power hate groups could fit their ideology into short messages, if they can type that well, but they're the FBI's problem, not the Army's. And even they'd mostly use it for things like "Goin to Wa||mrt - white sheets are on sale".
Yeah. DST is the government telling you to get up early and go to work, but change your clock to pretend you didn't do that. It didn't make much sense back when most city folks worked in factories, but it makes much less sense now when people who do work in offices ought to be keeping flextime to reduce commuting congestion.
Of course, GWBush wants it set to 1750, when he can be a Unitary Executive...
But it did always strike me as ironic that the Native Americans in Arizona are forced to set their clocks to times that aren't closely connected to the sun, while the city folks are allowed to have high noon at 12:00 where it belongs.
The US state of Delaware had blasphemy laws until 1968; I don't know if any other states still had them by then. The penalty was N lashes on the whipping post. The laws weren't used very often, though the whipping post got a bit more action, and a court case in 1968 got them both tossed out for obvious reasons like freedom of speech and religion and unacceptability of cruel and unusual punishment.
Most of the drug-related deaths in the US, other than from tobacco and alcohol, are from AIDS, which is spread because the US and state bans on "drug paraphrenalia" lead to needle-sharing.
The second-most common cause of death from illegal drugs is murders, including people in the black market arguing over turf and occasional users robbing people - again, that's the fault of the drug war - you don't see tobacco dealers getting in gunfights very often.
But sometimes, relatively benign drugs like MJ (or more dangerous drugs like heroin and alcohol) can lead to stupid behaviour, and stupidity recapitulates Darwinism all too frequently. On the other hand, unlike alcohol, MJ is more likely to cause you to stay home and order pizza instead of driving out to a bar, so there's some balance.
I remember getting one fundraising call from the "California Narcotics Officers Association" or some name like that - not only do they work for the drug war, but they were lobbying to get rid of medical marijuana, back when my father was dying of cancer (though not in California, and he didn't have chemo-related nausea until his last couple of weeks.) The call was placed by a telemarketing shop rather than the cops themselves, and I told them how sleazy the organization they were fundraising for was...
Meanwhile, in more recent news, California's cops are now being forced to tell people that just having the license plate from from their official charity isn't supposed to get you out of traffic tickets (wink wink, nudge nudge...).
Sometimes calls don't have number info with them even if the caller isn't blocking caller id, for a variety of random reasons. You probably want a less hostile message; spammers aren't going to improve their behaviour, and there's no point in being hostile to non-spammers. If any real humans call you from blocked numbers and complain that you're not answering, you can tell them that they'll need to unblock.
But if you do get annoyance calls with numbers, then yeah, give them the no-ring treatment and maybe the line-disconnected tri-tone beep in your answering message.
I don't expect many calls about Presidential candidates, since California looks solidly Obama, but I have been called about Prop 8, the anti-gay-marriage initiative. (Unfortunately I didn't have time to tell the callers why they should be ashamed of themselves...)
Regular commuter trains are just as good a target, and instead of fancy high-tech attacks you can dump piles of rock or logs on the tracks to derail them. (I think one of the US militia-wannabee groups did that once in the 90s, but it's really rare.)
The real problem has been that maglev trains are fabulously expensive, and the couple of them that have been deployed around the world are typically showpiece airport people-movers. While the US probably could have built one in the late 1990s boom when there was free tax money and venture capital falling from the sky, but now that Bush has added about $5T to the Federal debt and the Crisis is costing us another $1-2T, we won't be able to afford that for a while, even if Obama does get elected.
The simple captcha is just "press 1 to speak to Alice, 2 to speak to Bob, stay on to leave a message" etc. If it gets too popular and scammers start sending "1" tones, then "press 1 to hang up, 2 to speak to us, stay on to leave a message"
I'll have to try your cellphone trick - the interesting question is how widely they spread their internal DNC info (since they don't seem to care when I tell them to put me on their DNC list.) I've mostly been encouraging the auto-warranty scammers by letting them give me a price on my late-1980s Chevy Van (with randomly altered details), though at some point if I feel patient I may string them along about the 2005 Porsche (which actually belonged to my neighbor's kid, was more like a 1995, and the repo men got it when he went to jail:-)
I could run Vista at home, but first I'd need to pirate a faster graphics board, as opposed to the built-in motherboard video, and probably pirate some more RAM.
My wife, a computer scientist, did tax preparation during the 80s. The tax code is code - is was written to do things, and it's buggy and badly documented, but it's code. At the time she started, most of the tax code generally made some sense - it was full of special interest giveaways, obfuscation, ill-advised attempts at social policy, etc., but she had the impression that the people writing it generally knew what they were trying to accomplish with most sections - but the Reagan "tax cut" years added 30-50% more tax code, and she got the impression from watching the changes that the Congress was losing track of what it was trying to accomplish. There'd be things that got put in one year and patched the next (e.g. they were trying to do a favor for one Indian-run casino in South Dakota, the patch corrected the unintended favor that they'd also done for a casino in New Jersey, etc.)
The basics about deductability of things you've performed for charity probably haven't changed much since I last looked at it 20 years ago. If they paid you $X for your labor and you donated $X to them, you'd break even. That's not different if you're charging them $0. On the other hand, if you're donating materials in kind, you might be able to donate the costs of those materials - your CPA can tell you, and some kinds of deductions like costs of home offices are so often abused that you need to be very careful if you want to even try.
However, if you own a profit-making business, it's easier to have things you're doing be done by the business and therefore be expenses of the business. That's still not going to let you get paid for your labor, but costs like your computers, power, etc. are easier to put there, reducing the profit your business makes and therefore reducing your business's taxes. But if your business loses money more than X years out of Y, the IRS says it's not a business, it's a hobby, and you can't deduct the costs.
Some kinds of transactions are criminal - using stolen credit cards or selling their access information - but most of them are between willing buyers and willing sellers and can't be detected by dogs sniffing email packets at the borders.
Selling pills is a large popular worldwide business, selling herbal remedies is legal, and as long as the goods are packaged innocuously, they're not going to get caught if the product's bogus unless the buyers complain.
Selling wristwatches is even legal! And the seller said they were replicas, so as long as they don't quite violate trademarks, the goods won't get confiscated. (As a merchant in Hong Kong once told me, you want to buy the silver $5 Rolex from the street vendor, not the gold one, because it won't turn your wrists green.)
Selling use of botnets on cracked computers is probably illegal, but selling "marketing consulting services" or even "outsourced email services" isn't, and the bill isn't going to say it's for botnets.
As far as the credit card companies are concerned, as long as you received the merchandise you ordered, they're happy.
The US You-CAN-SPAM law is so easy to work around it's surprising that these guys are getting accused of violating it. If they're making $400K/month, they can afford a couple of thousand dollars a year to set up some shell corporations and buy some appropriate domain names.
It's not the best of headlines - my interpretation of "case leaks" was "it's dripping battery fluid" or "RF leaking enough to interfere with nearby devices", etc. That would have been worth a Slashdot article.
But if the leak is just not-yet-announced marketing information, then it needs to be pretty interesting.
It's been long enough since I've seen that set of statistics, so I don't remember what the average marriage ages was at the time, but in the British Colonies in North America, there were still a range of religious and cultural practices, and about 1/3 of brides were pregnant, which was only somewhat influenced by how strict the culture was about premarital sex. The big cultural difference from today was that if that did happen, the couple were expected to get married and support their kids together, and of course the ability back then of a 15-year-old couple to make a living as farmers or workers without another 10 years of school.
(I'm not saying you're "biased" as in "you bad person!", I'm saying it as in "you're looking at it from the limited US perspective, and many other places are different.")
That's so variable across cultures - an older Arab friend of mine says that where he grew up, men typically didn't get married until they were old enough to be financially stable and secure enough to support a family, which typically meant 30-year-old men marrying 20-year-old women. And of course there's that whole South Asian arranged marriage thing, where parents often give their daughters to older men. On the other hand, I grew up in Delaware, where the legal minimum age for marriage and sex was 12 - if you were old enough to have kids, you were old enough to be barefoot and pregnant on the farm (you might not get to inherit your parents' farm for a long time, but you were at least respected as an adult.)
(I get so tired of people who think they approve of evolution who don't have a clue what it's about - much more annoying than people who disapprove of it being clueless...)
"Survival of the fittest" doesn't mean that there's some Platonic ideal of "fitness" that evolution is pushing us toward, and the individuals who are closest to it survive. It's not a description of the future, it's a description of the past - it just means that at the time you're looking, the individuals with those characteristics are Not Dead Yet. It means that those whose characteristics matched the current environmental pressures tended to reproduce more successfully, and often but not always that means that they got to live longer or be healthier - sometimes that means that the whole population is larger, but sometimes a larger population is doomed whereas a smaller slower-growing population might have survived the next food supply crisis. You can't tell, and evolution doesn't care.
There's been a lot of evolution in microbes caused by modern medicine - lots of resistance to different antibiotics.
Also, agriculture has allowed human populations to increase radically, and we've only had about 10000 years to catch up with the changes in diets and 100-200 years to catch up with industrialization and big cities. So there's a lot of opportunity for radical changes to hit us.
It's really annoying to me to have to call the Democrats "the Party of Fiscal Responsibility", because they didn't get that way by being responsible and wanting to cut government spending, they got that way by default, with Bush,Cheney,&Rove spending borrowed money like there's no tomorrow.
Bill Clinton does deserve some credit - it *was* the economy, stupid, and his administration did a good job of managing the situation they got left with, though they did manage to spend the proceeds of a radically productive technology boom. And a lot of the spending restraint he showed was because the Republican-dominated Congress kept attacking him over his tacky personal life so he couldn't do most of the Democrat-agenda big-spending programs like HillaryCare, whereas after Bush got elected they were too scared to say no to anything he wanted (and even after Katrina and losing the war demonstrated the failure of Bush's Strong Trustworthy Powerful Father-Figure model of government got enough of Congress replaced by Democrats, Bush kept them scared as well.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd been saying a bit more than that, but that's the core idea - if you remember the 60s and 70s, Marxists especially tended to like long wordy rambling documents where they can enjoy the sounds of their own voices/pens/typewriters, and the works produced by committees make sure that everybody gets to put in their own wrinkles on it, and that kind of extremism simply isn't made to fit into Twitter messages or SMS or even IM.
Yes, I've read it, a few decades ago. (Ok, more precisely I've read "Capital", I forget whose translation, because my German wasn't quite up to reading the original "Das Kapital", but the problems were the logic, not the translation. I think my German copy was Roman-type rather than Fraktur.) That's why I was specifically insulting it, in contrast to the Communist Manifesto which has problems but is really kick-ass writing. If the phrase "tried to read it" applies, though I'm pretty sure I did finish it, it's because it was laughably bad, and maybe I wasn't giving it the respect that such a seriously intended work hoped to achieve. Now that I've got the perspective of a couple more decades of looking at real economics and not just theoretical economics, it might be interesting to re-read it. Some of his insights into capitalists' needs to expand markets weren't totally stupid, but the whole Labor Theory of Value that was the foundation of the document is simply wrong.
I don't know the details of what you're trying to accomplish here, so I can't comment on the legality, but it sounds like you think there are some issues, and you _and_ your boss need to discuss it with your company's lawyer (if you have one.) And you need to explain to your boss that terms of service can be legally binding, and can have copyright issues, and also that web-based data providers not only change data formats enough that your lost programming time might cost more than buying the data you need, but also that they can look for automated scraping and hand you bogus results.
The robots.txt files were originally designed to tell robots to stop doing heavy-duty queries on sites that couldn't handle it, but also to keep outsiders (especially spammers) from abusing content. And your code needs to follow robots.txt, because many many sites have robot traps that do unfriendly things to unfriendly visitors ("Nice lookin' robot you got there - be a shame if anything happened to it!") - or do userfriendly things to them.
As you say, Marx was an idiot - but if you look at him and most "Marxists" of various sorts who follow him, they were really verbose idiots. Sure, Engels got him to fit the Communist Manifesto in a short, punchy document with memorable slogans, but Das Kapital or the Unabomber's 35000-word manifesto were more typical. And most of the Islamic extremists are really verbose as well. Twitter and text messages are simply the wrong medium for ideological extremists to use.
Twitter may be fine for tactical operational messages or for non-ideologicals like gangs - "Lets go kill the Haitians!" fits just fine. Marxists can at least use Twitter to say "Let's go get beer"; even that doesn't work for the Islamics.
Maybe the white-power hate groups could fit their ideology into short messages, if they can type that well, but they're the FBI's problem, not the Army's. And even they'd mostly use it for things like "Goin to Wa||mrt - white sheets are on sale".
Of course, the movies would have bean a lot shorter. But on the TV show, she could allow River to have reasonably deep access.
Yeah. DST is the government telling you to get up early and go to work, but change your clock to pretend you didn't do that. It didn't make much sense back when most city folks worked in factories, but it makes much less sense now when people who do work in offices ought to be keeping flextime to reduce commuting congestion.
Of course, GWBush wants it set to 1750, when he can be a Unitary Executive...
But it did always strike me as ironic that the Native Americans in Arizona are forced to set their clocks to times that aren't closely connected to the sun, while the city folks are allowed to have high noon at 12:00 where it belongs.
Russell Means's comment on that was "we always called ourselves Indians"...
The US state of Delaware had blasphemy laws until 1968; I don't know if any other states still had them by then. The penalty was N lashes on the whipping post. The laws weren't used very often, though the whipping post got a bit more action, and a court case in 1968 got them both tossed out for obvious reasons like freedom of speech and religion and unacceptability of cruel and unusual punishment.
Most of the drug-related deaths in the US, other than from tobacco and alcohol, are from AIDS, which is spread because the US and state bans on "drug paraphrenalia" lead to needle-sharing.
The second-most common cause of death from illegal drugs is murders, including people in the black market arguing over turf and occasional users robbing people - again, that's the fault of the drug war - you don't see tobacco dealers getting in gunfights very often.
But sometimes, relatively benign drugs like MJ (or more dangerous drugs like heroin and alcohol) can lead to stupid behaviour, and stupidity recapitulates Darwinism all too frequently. On the other hand, unlike alcohol, MJ is more likely to cause you to stay home and order pizza instead of driving out to a bar, so there's some balance.
I remember getting one fundraising call from the "California Narcotics Officers Association" or some name like that - not only do they work for the drug war, but they were lobbying to get rid of medical marijuana, back when my father was dying of cancer (though not in California, and he didn't have chemo-related nausea until his last couple of weeks.) The call was placed by a telemarketing shop rather than the cops themselves, and I told them how sleazy the organization they were fundraising for was...
Meanwhile, in more recent news, California's cops are now being forced to tell people that just having the license plate from from their official charity isn't supposed to get you out of traffic tickets (wink wink, nudge nudge...).
Sometimes calls don't have number info with them even if the caller isn't blocking caller id, for a variety of random reasons. You probably want a less hostile message; spammers aren't going to improve their behaviour, and there's no point in being hostile to non-spammers. If any real humans call you from blocked numbers and complain that you're not answering, you can tell them that they'll need to unblock.
But if you do get annoyance calls with numbers, then yeah, give them the no-ring treatment and maybe the line-disconnected tri-tone beep in your answering message.
I don't expect many calls about Presidential candidates, since California looks solidly Obama, but I have been called about Prop 8, the anti-gay-marriage initiative. (Unfortunately I didn't have time to tell the callers why they should be ashamed of themselves...)
Regular commuter trains are just as good a target, and instead of fancy high-tech attacks you can dump piles of rock or logs on the tracks to derail them. (I think one of the US militia-wannabee groups did that once in the 90s, but it's really rare.)
The real problem has been that maglev trains are fabulously expensive, and the couple of them that have been deployed around the world are typically showpiece airport people-movers. While the US probably could have built one in the late 1990s boom when there was free tax money and venture capital falling from the sky, but now that Bush has added about $5T to the Federal debt and the Crisis is costing us another $1-2T, we won't be able to afford that for a while, even if Obama does get elected.
The simple captcha is just "press 1 to speak to Alice, 2 to speak to Bob, stay on to leave a message" etc. If it gets too popular and scammers start sending "1" tones, then "press 1 to hang up, 2 to speak to us, stay on to leave a message"
I'll have to try your cellphone trick - the interesting question is how widely they spread their internal DNC info (since they don't seem to care when I tell them to put me on their DNC list.) I've mostly been encouraging the auto-warranty scammers by letting them give me a price on my late-1980s Chevy Van (with randomly altered details), though at some point if I feel patient I may string them along about the 2005 Porsche (which actually belonged to my neighbor's kid, was more like a 1995, and the repo men got it when he went to jail :-)
I could run Vista at home, but first I'd need to pirate a faster graphics board, as opposed to the built-in motherboard video, and probably pirate some more RAM.
My wife, a computer scientist, did tax preparation during the 80s. The tax code is code - is was written to do things, and it's buggy and badly documented, but it's code. At the time she started, most of the tax code generally made some sense - it was full of special interest giveaways, obfuscation, ill-advised attempts at social policy, etc., but she had the impression that the people writing it generally knew what they were trying to accomplish with most sections - but the Reagan "tax cut" years added 30-50% more tax code, and she got the impression from watching the changes that the Congress was losing track of what it was trying to accomplish. There'd be things that got put in one year and patched the next (e.g. they were trying to do a favor for one Indian-run casino in South Dakota, the patch corrected the unintended favor that they'd also done for a casino in New Jersey, etc.)
The basics about deductability of things you've performed for charity probably haven't changed much since I last looked at it 20 years ago. If they paid you $X for your labor and you donated $X to them, you'd break even. That's not different if you're charging them $0. On the other hand, if you're donating materials in kind, you might be able to donate the costs of those materials - your CPA can tell you, and some kinds of deductions like costs of home offices are so often abused that you need to be very careful if you want to even try.
However, if you own a profit-making business, it's easier to have things you're doing be done by the business and therefore be expenses of the business. That's still not going to let you get paid for your labor, but costs like your computers, power, etc. are easier to put there, reducing the profit your business makes and therefore reducing your business's taxes. But if your business loses money more than X years out of Y, the IRS says it's not a business, it's a hobby, and you can't deduct the costs.
Some kinds of transactions are criminal - using stolen credit cards or selling their access information - but most of them are between willing buyers and willing sellers and can't be detected by dogs sniffing email packets at the borders.
With some plants, after you've
It's not the best of headlines - my interpretation of "case leaks" was "it's dripping battery fluid" or "RF leaking enough to interfere with nearby devices", etc. That would have been worth a Slashdot article.
But if the leak is just not-yet-announced marketing information, then it needs to be pretty interesting.
It's been long enough since I've seen that set of statistics, so I don't remember what the average marriage ages was at the time, but in the British Colonies in North America, there were still a range of religious and cultural practices, and about 1/3 of brides were pregnant, which was only somewhat influenced by how strict the culture was about premarital sex. The big cultural difference from today was that if that did happen, the couple were expected to get married and support their kids together, and of course the ability back then of a 15-year-old couple to make a living as farmers or workers without another 10 years of school.
(I'm not saying you're "biased" as in "you bad person!", I'm saying it as in "you're looking at it from the limited US perspective, and many other places are different.")
That's so variable across cultures - an older Arab friend of mine says that where he grew up, men typically didn't get married until they were old enough to be financially stable and secure enough to support a family, which typically meant 30-year-old men marrying 20-year-old women. And of course there's that whole South Asian arranged marriage thing, where parents often give their daughters to older men. On the other hand, I grew up in Delaware, where the legal minimum age for marriage and sex was 12 - if you were old enough to have kids, you were old enough to be barefoot and pregnant on the farm (you might not get to inherit your parents' farm for a long time, but you were at least respected as an adult.)
(I get so tired of people who think they approve of evolution who don't have a clue what it's about - much more annoying than people who disapprove of it being clueless...)
"Survival of the fittest" doesn't mean that there's some Platonic ideal of "fitness" that evolution is pushing us toward, and the individuals who are closest to it survive. It's not a description of the future, it's a description of the past - it just means that at the time you're looking, the individuals with those characteristics are Not Dead Yet. It means that those whose characteristics matched the current environmental pressures tended to reproduce more successfully, and often but not always that means that they got to live longer or be healthier - sometimes that means that the whole population is larger, but sometimes a larger population is doomed whereas a smaller slower-growing population might have survived the next food supply crisis. You can't tell, and evolution doesn't care.
There's been a lot of evolution in microbes caused by modern medicine - lots of resistance to different antibiotics.
Also, agriculture has allowed human populations to increase radically, and we've only had about 10000 years to catch up with the changes in diets and 100-200 years to catch up with industrialization and big cities. So there's a lot of opportunity for radical changes to hit us.
It's really annoying to me to have to call the Democrats "the Party of Fiscal Responsibility", because they didn't get that way by being responsible and wanting to cut government spending, they got that way by default, with Bush,Cheney,&Rove spending borrowed money like there's no tomorrow.
Bill Clinton does deserve some credit - it *was* the economy, stupid, and his administration did a good job of managing the situation they got left with, though they did manage to spend the proceeds of a radically productive technology boom. And a lot of the spending restraint he showed was because the Republican-dominated Congress kept attacking him over his tacky personal life so he couldn't do most of the Democrat-agenda big-spending programs like HillaryCare, whereas after Bush got elected they were too scared to say no to anything he wanted (and even after Katrina and losing the war demonstrated the failure of Bush's Strong Trustworthy Powerful Father-Figure model of government got enough of Congress replaced by Democrats, Bush kept them scared as well.)