His comments makes me want to see an audit of every budget he's been involved in. If he can't handle 10th grade math, he simply should not be *in charge* of allocating millions of dollars every year.
He can help, he can suggest, but he needs someone to check his work.
Seems like it'd be more useful if you and your peers pooled your funds and bought yourself a few politicians. They're not actually all that expensive. Start with the municipal ones (they're the cheapest), save up for some state legislators, and then work your way up to the federal suits.
Oh and btw, you can make sure your bought & paid for politicians are getting paid to make sensible, fair, and just laws, and to oppose all that is unjust.
Governing takes work, time, effort, money, and organization. Responding to your understandable frustration by voluntarily removing yourself from the process entirely will affect the system every bit as much as your failure to vote will -- not at all.
The author of a piece of music is the singer, just as the author of the book is the writer, not the publisher.
Do i need to break out dictionary.com definitions? Who wrote the songs? WHo performed it? Those are the authors, this is simple stuff.
My copyright law prof told me that, after we completed a copyright law class, we'd start noticing how many entirely inaccurate claims are out there about copyright, and how vehemently people advanced them. This is one of the better examples I've seen in a while. You're *both* wrong, on certain points.
It's true that the "guy holding the camera" is almost certainly not the copyright holder, nor the author, of the video. But this isn't because of some intrinsic creative function of the camera guy; it's almost certainly because the camera operator was part of a team, had signed a work-for-hire contract which meant that he/she does not get any copyright in the work.
The thing that really hurts my brain here is the subsequent claim that "The author of a piece of music is the singer." Good heavens, no, no, no NO. A singer is analogous to a person reading a book out loud. This is an act of performance, not of authorship.
The singer/reader can be the author, but they'd have had to actually create the work. While pieces can be created spontaneously, singing a song that someone else wrote doesn't make one an author.
Frequently what happens with heavily-produced crap like this is that the asshole with the biggest pile of money (the star) hires all the actually skilled musicians and tech people who do all the dirty work of songcraft, locks them into a work-for-hire contract, so that the non-star peons have no copyright in whatever creative, original, author-worthy output they create.
Were it not for those pieces of paper, because of the necessarily collaborative nature of this kind of creative work, most commercial music, commercial videos, and all movies would be considered works of joint authorship, and all joint authors would have certain rights.
That said, just because you sing a song doesn't mean that you wrote it.
1. Is it a correct thing to allow interpretation of Constitution?
2. Is it a correct thing to allow the government live on debt?
3. Is it a correct thing to allow the government control money supply and cost?
4. Is it a correct thing to give the government power to insure people in any way (from deposit insurance to health and retirement)?
5. Is it a correct thing to give the government power to tax people's incomes?
6. Is it a correct thing to give government power to provide security against criminal activity by diminishing individual liberties?
7. Is it a correct thing to allow government regulate business?
8. If these same questions were posed differently, would you have recognized them in their true form?
---
The correct long term answer to items 1-7 is always a 'no', it cannot be a 'yes' under any circumstances, but that's the long term thinking.
Oh ffs. To believe that the "correct" answer to those questions is always no demonstrates a breathtaking ignorance of history. What's worse, you consider yourself a "sophisticated" voter!
Those questions have been answered no repeatedly, by similarly-minded people, and have repeatedly ended in widespread, disastrous, often violent failures.
Are you unaware of the violence and damage wrought by strict literalists of various types? It continues to this day. Why would you think constitutional literalists would differ from biblical or koranical literalists? How many more examples of this guy do you need -- http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-passionate-defender-of-what-he-imagines-c,2849/
Have you learned nothing at all of the depths of depravity to which industrial will stoop if unregulated? Refer to the Sago Mine disaster for a recent example, if you can't bother with the countless examples from centuries past.
Do you recommend preserving the individual liberties of violent felons --murderers, rapists, extortionist thugs, etc-- at the expense of security?
Replace "government" with "people" and run through those questions again.
I think what you're suggesting is that you don't consider paper and ink to be a technology, or at least an advanced one. If this is an accurate description of your position, I'd have to disagree with you. Paper and ink is of the most mature technologies known to human kind. It has been through countless generations and revisions. Even crude earlier versions have demonstrated the ability to preserve information in an accessible format for thousands of years.
I have a full room in my house with the walls covered with books and books stacked in boxes and a chair... I call it the library. I find it doubtful my children will buy paper books later in life. They're inconvenient, wasteful, and they suck up space.
I have something I call the "library" also: it is the public library. It has plenty of shelf space to stack the books, and does so in an accessible order. Using this library saves me the inconvenience and space of maintaining my own collection of paper books. It's also much cheaper. Most books don't get reread anyway, and buying a one-time-use item like that seems like a waste.
I had to open a "Checking account"... I mean really? A checking account. That would imply the use of paper checks... WTF!!! are you still in the dark ages?
Bank accounts are a possible vector for fraud. It would be a fraudster's ideal situation if they were to establish a US bank account without having to provide any paper trail. I believe that it is much easier to detect fraudulent transactions when there is a paper trail. We do already have a few centuries' worth of work completed on authenticating paper documents.
Setting a high standard for an initial transaction until sufficient trust is established to allow more convenient (and less secure) transactions seems like a reasonable approach.
They insisted I provide a paper form of payment other than cash to open the account and insisted it was sent through the mail. I was mortified. I don't even know how to do that.
I don't understand why you believe that getting a money order, cashier's check, counter check, or personal check is mortifyingly inconvenient. The first three require going into a bank. 7-11 stores can exchange your cash for a money order, for a fee. Mailing a personal check simply requires having a checkbook, and envelope, and a stamp. Checks, stamps, and envelopes can be purchased online, not to mention at many stores. Stamps and envelopes are even available at most large grocery stores.
Simply use SOPA against SOPA supporters. Claim copyright ownership of the websites of Senators and Representatives who voted for it, of the lobbying groups who supported it, especially all prominent individual members who supported it.
Do this for every public message they try to get out, wherever they post. If & once a claim is rejected, another person comes along to claim copyright ownership and restart the process.
In a statement obtained by CNET that's scheduled to be delivered tomorrow, the Justice Department argues...
This interpretation is so obviously wrong, both in terms of common sense and as a textbook example that I suspect it's simply author Declan McCullagh trolling for outrage and click-throughs, perhaps unintentionally. Arguing that a violation of a private contract between two parties should be criminalized is simply not something a person who has passed any state bar --or a 1L criminal law course-- could make.
I'd like to see the "statement obtained by CNET", but of course it's nowhere to be found. All we have is McCaullagh's interpretation of it. I think... I hope... he's simply misreading the statement. It's convenient that they do not provide the source for which this article is entirely based upon.
To be fair, most people haven't read most (or any) of the *actual* laws that they're bound by: the federal/state/municipal statutes, regulations, case law, and constitutions.
It's even quite rare to find a news article about particular law that actually bothers to link to, name, or cite the actual law being discussed.
That is interesting, but from your usage, it appears that you misunderstand what being an "activist" judge means. An "activist" judge is one who attempts to create law in the courtroom, as opposed to evaluating existing law. It is not a "left vs. right", "liberal vs. conservative" concept.
The US is a common law country. Common law can accurately be described as "judge-made-law". Published decisions and opinions *are* law.
Any judge who publishes a decision or opinion is creating law. Stare decisis means that future courts/judges are supposed to take into account previous judge-made-law, and rule as consistently with it as possible. (Less frequently prior decisions/opinions are overruled, or (slightly more often) "distinguished".)
As I understand it, "activist" judge is used to describe a judge whose law --again, judges do indeed write law, the common law-- is inconsistent with the ideology of a particular group o/f non-judge authors and/or talking heads. These people are curiously undisturbed by judges who make law that fits their own preconceptions.
"Activist judges" is a code for "I disagree with their opinion." It cannot simply mean one who "attempts to create law in the courtroom", since that is an essential element of a common law system.
It is also noticeable that foreign governments, international organizations (G20 for example) and sports bodies (FIFA for example) see Mexico as a safe enough place to make business with.
Multi-track audio recording is something I always want on my desktop. For multitrack recording, latency is key. Real time access is what makes it possible on Linux (I think Ingo Molnar did most of the work on that.) Anything around 6ms or higher is too much. Maybe it's possible to have single-digit latency w/out an RT kernel, but I've never seen it.
I believe that real time kernel is simply theoretically incompatible w/ BSD's security model. Unless they can get the latency down to usable levels, it'll never work for my desktop.
It is interesting to think that education by vending machine is turning out to be so successful. I can understand how degrees by coursework can benefit from this. It will be interesting if universities with real brands will ever allow master or doctorates to be via online study. When I did my post grad degree, I saw my supervisor for an hour every week, and I know I was lucky at that. I had a friend who was doing his PhD which saw his supervisor for a grand total of 20 hours during his entire research project. He basically just was included as a name in the research papers, and copied in on any and all email correspondence. Even thought is becoming ever more automated these days.
Being merely CC'd on emails throughout the entirety of one's PhD sounds exactly like a doctorate via (almost) online study.
I felt exactly the same way for years. It's an incredibly frustrating perspective. There is a different one, but I only reached it after formally studying consumer law.
Keep in mind these are CREDIT agencies, and what that means. Credit is someone else is agreeing to loan you money, be it revolving (a credit card, for example) or intended for a specific purchase (home, car, etc.) If the friendly corner store owner is willing to let you pay him back next time b/c you forgot your wallet, they're also extending you credit. Banks, CC companies, and that store owner --creditors-- will want to have some way to gauge whether or not you'll actually pay them back.
The store owner has known you for years, but what about everyone else who doesn't know you at all? They need a way to assess your creditworthiness. When one's business involves extending credit to people (like you), that business need to be able to assess the likelihood of whether or not you'll pay them back as agreed.
Before credit agencies and credit scores, creditors (mostly banks) used their own changing criteria and investigations to determine whether or not a person was creditworthy. There's a lot to it, but cultural bias proved that creditors greatly, and consistently discriminated on the basis of sex, race, and other factors. (As for the store owners, well they'd just talk to each other, and rat out the local deadbeats. Stiff one merchant in a small, tight town, and good luck getting credit from any other merchant.) Ideally this would be an objective, nondiscriminatory, fair, formulaic approach. That's what the current regime of credit agencies and credit scores is intended to emulate.
So a credit report is just 7-year account of exactly the kind of information that creditors will want to know about you before they decide whether or not to give you money. While the information they collect is *about* you. It is not yours, any more than the fact that I saw you on the street with Bill the other day is "your" information, and you have some special privileges as to if and how I can share that. Similarly, credit agencies serve as an independent means for creditors to get the scoop on you for people who are trying to figure out if you'll pay as agreed, or if they'll lose money on you. If you didn't pay your credit card bill for three months in a row, it seems fair that any other credit card company (or other creditor) should be able to know about it.
It's more complex, obviously. Real harm can occur to consumers, particularly from false/inaccurate data. This is why you are able to dispute and add to your own credit report.
..how many of the people posting take this so lightly. There should be outrage here. Companies bearing weight on congress is not a good idea, people. Maybe many of you are too young to see what is going on, but the idea is that the country is governed by the people and for the people, not by Mr. Facebook for his company. And while you have 20 seconds of laugh writing a funny post, your future is eroding right in front of your eyes, and you are completely oblivious to it...
I understand your feelings, but when it comes down to it outrage isn't going to *do* anything about the problem of "companies bearing weight on congress." Love it or hate it, corporate influence on US government is a reality. That bell has already rung.
The reason that so many are just fine with corporate influence on Congress is that, well, corporations are people. I don't mean in the sense of legal recognition, I mean the CEO, the board, middle management, HR, accounting, and stakeholders -- these are all of-the-by-the people too, and they the right to organize themselves as they see fit. Corporate organization is one method of organization that people use to, intentionally influence Congress.
My concern is that generalizing this to some larger principle that "corporate influence on congress = bad" oversimplifies things. Because, despite the legions of lobbyists whose only target is money, there are actually other well-intended groups of (of-the-by-the) people who have used the corporate form as a method to organize and more effectively lobby Congress to address their own concerns.
Of course, *I* want f/b to have as little influence on legislation as possible --they could realistically do some serious damage to privacy statutes and regulations. But I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of somehow stripping of-the-by-the people of their rights to organize simply because they use a common form of business organization to be profitable. A lobby-specific approach seems more effective to me than just outrage. Perhaps outrage can inspire people to action, but most of the time I think it just adds stress that ultimately gets in the way.
It would be useful to keep a close eye on any upcoming amendments to privacy law, if you're not already. The Federal Register is the official daily publication of Congress, and will probably be the first place any f/b lobby influence appears. http://www.gpoaccess.gov/fr/
If you've never taken a moment to read your country's laws in raw form, I highly recommend it. Try a search for "privacy", and dive in. Note that most proposed regulations have a "request for comments." These comments eventually do become part of the official regulatory history. Unfortunately at this point --in part because let's face it, regs are kind of boring to read-- these comment sections are incredibly sparse, often containing only pre-canned statements from industry groups (coordinated by your favorite corporate lobby, of course). Next most often is individual commentary around the level of the youtube comment section.
You might be able to effectively focus your outrage here. But from what I've seen of regulatory history, the most effective comments are note outraged -- they are those that are calm (not angry), to the point with the person's concern, what they feel the effect of proposed reg would be, and light on the preaching, light on the adjectives, and light on the hyperbole -- preferably none of that noise, at all.
Why it will be like the wasteland it was 24/7 before they managed to provide cell service in BART trains a few years ago, good god!
Riding BART is already enough of a pain in the ass. If they have to shut it down to keep someone's "important political statement" from tying up my commute for an hour +, I am all fucking for it. Honestly people, I promise you: I do not want to hear how outraged you are at social injustices while I'm on the train. I probably just listened to ~8 hours of blowhard assholes all day, or am on my way to do so.
I am functioning on a level of coffee and egg sandwiches. It's not really prime ground for inspiring change.
Thing is that the 3DS, because it is a toy, has just a beautiful interface. It's even shinier and prettier than OSX.
It's maximized for neither efficiency nor speed, certainly. But the touchscreen interface reactions --the individualized chords built into button click reactions, for example-- are so detailed, they make you want to push all the buttons just to see how they respond. Lag is anticipated, and the meters are much better than multicolored spinning wheels or wildly disparate time estimates.
The controls are what you would expect from the company that developed the NES controller, after decades of further in-depth button, cross, trigger, and stick interface R&D. Even the tiny little volume slide seems like the braking touch was carefully developed. The media UI through the 3DS OS is much better than the minimum-acceptable-functionality that I can access from my couch with company-supplied VOD remotes. If I can end up using this as a remote, it would seem like top-shelf control hardware compared to those horrible rubber buttons.
I only bought this thing to play the Ocarina of Time. I managed to never play the original, and going through such a lauded game for the first time on overpriced hardware seems as indulgent as a spa or luxury mattress. So streaming Netflix was an unexpected bonus --even the new Chromebooks cannot, and they're running more than twice as much.
I'll cop to my own possible bias --I bought a 3DS early, and might be trying to psychologically overcompensate for getting socked the extra cash. The price dropped days after I bought mine; it blows no doubt. Especially b/c you could have both got it at the reduced price and made the "ambassador program", at least if you do it in the next few hours. (Free crap I'd have long ago downloaded elsewhere if I gave a crap about it. Nice to have undoubtedly legal copies of old libraries, I guess.)
The 3D thing made me dizzy after a minute and I mostly keep it off (except for the cut-scenes, because what the hell), but it's fun to play this, and I've gone a few hours at a stretch. It might easily turn out to be the most polished game for this OS, but polish the 3DS has in spades.
Books will become antiques and collectors items. If one looks at the 21 century information society, books have no place in it. Once all current books are scanned and fully digitized, any human on the planet with an internet connection will be able to access them. This is a powerful tool that is not fully realized. e-book technology is till in its infancy. You're also fooling yourself if you assume that a paper book is automatically superior to a digital version. A paper book only has one copy, is probably printed on cheap paper, supportable to moisture, mold, insect, natural disaster, fire... you name it. Books are perishable goods and none too portable. Digital information is forever and can be backed up infinitely.
=What your perspective overlooks is how advanced the technology of books has become. Paper, ink, printing, and binding are a self-evidently open design that has been refined over the course of dozens of centuries. The technology is relatively advanced and mature. OTOH, the equipment you appear to rely on is far more vulnerable to moisture, mold, insect, natural disasters, fire, EMPs, etc.
I agree that it's possible that books might eventually become obsolete antiques, but within 100 years will is much too soon. Digital technology needs several centuries to just begin to catch up with paper, ink, and glue.
An article Friday on the web site of one of the newspapers, La Libre, took issue with Google's interpretation.
"It is necessary to distinguish the Google search engine from the Google news service," the article said. "The news editors do not oppose having their content referenced by the Google search engine, they refuse on the other hand for their informational content to be included in Google News," the article said.
It seems as if the newspapers wish to impose their own, limited understanding of a service they use on the way a company does business. Based on that statement, it's difficult to determine exactly what the arrogance -to- ignorance ratio behind this litigation has been.
The biggest challege I faced living without a home internet connection was a lack of reference materials. A text dump of wikipedia is a good start, but also grab anything you have a professional interest in, e.g. all the O'Reilly books. Also a good home repair guide, your car manual, outdoor survival guide, medical texts, home chemistry book, cookbooks, karma sutra, and if you can get a dump of instructables or about.com or wikihow, you're probably pretty good. A general selection of science, art, literature, and philosophy texts should also not go amiss. For fiction, take a dump of Project Gutenberg and/or some large ebook torrents. Calibre is software designed to manage ebooks, specifically in relation to ebook readers, which it excels at, but it is also an excellent way to catelogue a large quantity of ebooks.
If you're into games, the biggest N64 rom was 64 MB (Conker's Bad Fur Day, Resident Evil), so every game and game system manufactured before the introduction of the Playstation should only be in the tens of gigabytes.
It almost goes without saying that you should store information about your online contacts.
It's difficult to predict what information you'll need. Good sources of information are rare, it's wise to have a technical library with a high degree of redundancy, i.e. multiple books on the same subject, especially if it is a subject of high interest or importance (e.g. emergency medicine). Data redundancy isn't a bad idea either.
Sounds like Kish was banking entirely on the hopes of a default judgment as his lottery ticket. Then when he got his pipe dream, he didn't know the first thing to do about landing it. Apparently Kish expected Spamhaus to just roll over and send along a check of $11.7m.
Spamhaus did what sounds like just about the least they could bother to do in response --accept an offer of free legal representation. Kish spent three days back before the trial court looking more closely at that $11.7m number.
Then, he just let his client vary what he was asking for from $1m to $130m. It sounds as if Kish had just hired some flack "expert" to agree with the $11.7m figure, or *any* figure, he probably could have avoided this severe of a dressing-down. Any award still would have been appealed of course, as Spamhaus would just then in turn hire its own expert witnesses. But then this argument would have been a question of expert credibility, not a direct challenge to Kish's competency to practice law by probably the most prominent living federal appeals judge.
Posner says it right here:
When Kish noted that the damages request was later reduced to $30 million, Posner said "That's also preposterous," noting that it's hard to believe a company that never made more than $140,000 in a year could suffer damages that large. "How can a court be bothered with such pie-in-the-sky damages estimates without expert evidence?" he asked.
I see Apple iPhone ads almost ever other commercial break. Direct ones from apple, and carrier branded ones.. They are on constantly... I see giant Android signs up in malls.
Why are you excluding fully cloud-based solutions? If the only reason is because you want local backup, I think you should reconsider using google docs. It immediately popped into my mind reading your description. If you're concerned about losing your material in the cloud, it's a trivial matter to create a local backup of all your docs.
Fwiw, I just finished law school, and wound up using google docs to organize everything I had --text notes, journal articles, diagrams and scanned documents, even a handful of audio clips. It permits full-text & metadata search, tags, preserved the underlying files, and is cross-platform.
If you have other reasons why you don't want a fully cloud-based solution, please describe them so we can better understand (and hopefully address) them.
The school's concern might have a sound basis. I think the admins who did this were more concerned about liability of ignoring a possible sign of next US school shooting than the subtle contours of the intersection between 1st Amendment law and public schools. Quality or message aside, the video does --objectively speaking-- open with scenes of violence.
Arguably these scenes are (crudely) glorified. Who gives a shit? It's violent media, and it seems that even in the most heavily censored regimes, there is an acceptable level of violence from moderate to explicitly detailed.
I don't believe the school would or should care whether there IS a link between real violence and creative output nearly as much as it would care that there MIGHT be a link. That would be the worst-case scenario here.
This just seems like basic business sense: don't enter into unprofitable agreements. The photographer put a limit on the number of these offers. It seems like a reasonable guess that he was better able to do the arithmetic than the article author, who is purely speculating that this came out to a net loss.
FTFA: "And they were made to promise that if they did, their families would only seek the legal minimum in damages."
So, there is some form of enforcement after all. The legality of this, I couldn't say.
I don't know if it applies to China -- I get the idea that China law is sold to the highest bidder, with discounts for nepotism. But in non-corrupt contract theory, one person does not have the capacity to contract away the rights of another, at least not as described here.
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His comments makes me want to see an audit of every budget he's been involved in. If he can't handle 10th grade math, he simply should not be *in charge* of allocating millions of dollars every year.
He can help, he can suggest, but he needs someone to check his work.
Seems like it'd be more useful if you and your peers pooled your funds and bought yourself a few politicians. They're not actually all that expensive. Start with the municipal ones (they're the cheapest), save up for some state legislators, and then work your way up to the federal suits.
Oh and btw, you can make sure your bought & paid for politicians are getting paid to make sensible, fair, and just laws, and to oppose all that is unjust.
Governing takes work, time, effort, money, and organization. Responding to your understandable frustration by voluntarily removing yourself from the process entirely will affect the system every bit as much as your failure to vote will -- not at all.
The author of a piece of music is the singer, just as the author of the book is the writer, not the publisher.
Do i need to break out dictionary.com definitions? Who wrote the songs? WHo performed it? Those are the authors, this is simple stuff.
My copyright law prof told me that, after we completed a copyright law class, we'd start noticing how many entirely inaccurate claims are out there about copyright, and how vehemently people advanced them. This is one of the better examples I've seen in a while. You're *both* wrong, on certain points.
It's true that the "guy holding the camera" is almost certainly not the copyright holder, nor the author, of the video. But this isn't because of some intrinsic creative function of the camera guy; it's almost certainly because the camera operator was part of a team, had signed a work-for-hire contract which meant that he/she does not get any copyright in the work.
The thing that really hurts my brain here is the subsequent claim that "The author of a piece of music is the singer." Good heavens, no, no, no NO. A singer is analogous to a person reading a book out loud. This is an act of performance, not of authorship.
The singer/reader can be the author, but they'd have had to actually create the work. While pieces can be created spontaneously, singing a song that someone else wrote doesn't make one an author.
Frequently what happens with heavily-produced crap like this is that the asshole with the biggest pile of money (the star) hires all the actually skilled musicians and tech people who do all the dirty work of songcraft, locks them into a work-for-hire contract, so that the non-star peons have no copyright in whatever creative, original, author-worthy output they create.
Were it not for those pieces of paper, because of the necessarily collaborative nature of this kind of creative work, most commercial music, commercial videos, and all movies would be considered works of joint authorship, and all joint authors would have certain rights.
That said, just because you sing a song doesn't mean that you wrote it.
1. Is it a correct thing to allow interpretation of Constitution? 2. Is it a correct thing to allow the government live on debt? 3. Is it a correct thing to allow the government control money supply and cost? 4. Is it a correct thing to give the government power to insure people in any way (from deposit insurance to health and retirement)? 5. Is it a correct thing to give the government power to tax people's incomes? 6. Is it a correct thing to give government power to provide security against criminal activity by diminishing individual liberties? 7. Is it a correct thing to allow government regulate business? 8. If these same questions were posed differently, would you have recognized them in their true form? --- The correct long term answer to items 1-7 is always a 'no', it cannot be a 'yes' under any circumstances, but that's the long term thinking.
Oh ffs. To believe that the "correct" answer to those questions is always no demonstrates a breathtaking ignorance of history. What's worse, you consider yourself a "sophisticated" voter!
Those questions have been answered no repeatedly, by similarly-minded people, and have repeatedly ended in widespread, disastrous, often violent failures.
Are you unaware of the violence and damage wrought by strict literalists of various types? It continues to this day. Why would you think constitutional literalists would differ from biblical or koranical literalists? How many more examples of this guy do you need -- http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-passionate-defender-of-what-he-imagines-c,2849/
Have you learned nothing at all of the depths of depravity to which industrial will stoop if unregulated? Refer to the Sago Mine disaster for a recent example, if you can't bother with the countless examples from centuries past.
Do you recommend preserving the individual liberties of violent felons --murderers, rapists, extortionist thugs, etc-- at the expense of security?
Replace "government" with "people" and run through those questions again.
I have a full room in my house with the walls covered with books and books stacked in boxes and a chair... I call it the library. I find it doubtful my children will buy paper books later in life. They're inconvenient, wasteful, and they suck up space.
I have something I call the "library" also: it is the public library. It has plenty of shelf space to stack the books, and does so in an accessible order. Using this library saves me the inconvenience and space of maintaining my own collection of paper books. It's also much cheaper. Most books don't get reread anyway, and buying a one-time-use item like that seems like a waste.
I had to open a "Checking account"... I mean really? A checking account. That would imply the use of paper checks... WTF!!! are you still in the dark ages?
Bank accounts are a possible vector for fraud. It would be a fraudster's ideal situation if they were to establish a US bank account without having to provide any paper trail. I believe that it is much easier to detect fraudulent transactions when there is a paper trail. We do already have a few centuries' worth of work completed on authenticating paper documents.
Setting a high standard for an initial transaction until sufficient trust is established to allow more convenient (and less secure) transactions seems like a reasonable approach.
They insisted I provide a paper form of payment other than cash to open the account and insisted it was sent through the mail. I was mortified. I don't even know how to do that.
I don't understand why you believe that getting a money order, cashier's check, counter check, or personal check is mortifyingly inconvenient. The first three require going into a bank. 7-11 stores can exchange your cash for a money order, for a fee. Mailing a personal check simply requires having a checkbook, and envelope, and a stamp. Checks, stamps, and envelopes can be purchased online, not to mention at many stores. Stamps and envelopes are even available at most large grocery stores.
Simply use SOPA against SOPA supporters. Claim copyright ownership of the websites of Senators and Representatives who voted for it, of the lobbying groups who supported it, especially all prominent individual members who supported it.
Do this for every public message they try to get out, wherever they post. If & once a claim is rejected, another person comes along to claim copyright ownership and restart the process.
In a statement obtained by CNET that's scheduled to be delivered tomorrow, the Justice Department argues...
This interpretation is so obviously wrong, both in terms of common sense and as a textbook example that I suspect it's simply author Declan McCullagh trolling for outrage and click-throughs, perhaps unintentionally. Arguing that a violation of a private contract between two parties should be criminalized is simply not something a person who has passed any state bar --or a 1L criminal law course-- could make.
I'd like to see the "statement obtained by CNET", but of course it's nowhere to be found. All we have is McCaullagh's interpretation of it. I think... I hope... he's simply misreading the statement. It's convenient that they do not provide the source for which this article is entirely based upon.
To be fair, most people haven't read most (or any) of the *actual* laws that they're bound by: the federal/state/municipal statutes, regulations, case law, and constitutions.
It's even quite rare to find a news article about particular law that actually bothers to link to, name, or cite the actual law being discussed.
That is interesting, but from your usage, it appears that you misunderstand what being an "activist" judge means. An "activist" judge is one who attempts to create law in the courtroom, as opposed to evaluating existing law. It is not a "left vs. right", "liberal vs. conservative" concept.
The US is a common law country. Common law can accurately be described as "judge-made-law". Published decisions and opinions *are* law.
Any judge who publishes a decision or opinion is creating law. Stare decisis means that future courts/judges are supposed to take into account previous judge-made-law, and rule as consistently with it as possible. (Less frequently prior decisions/opinions are overruled, or (slightly more often) "distinguished".)
As I understand it, "activist" judge is used to describe a judge whose law --again, judges do indeed write law, the common law-- is inconsistent with the ideology of a particular group o/f non-judge authors and/or talking heads. These people are curiously undisturbed by judges who make law that fits their own preconceptions.
"Activist judges" is a code for "I disagree with their opinion." It cannot simply mean one who "attempts to create law in the courtroom", since that is an essential element of a common law system.
It is also noticeable that foreign governments, international organizations (G20 for example) and sports bodies (FIFA for example) see Mexico as a safe enough place to make business with.
It is also noticeable that the US State Department has issued a rather detailed travel warning in Mexico. http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/tw/tw_5440.html
Multi-track audio recording is something I always want on my desktop. For multitrack recording, latency is key. Real time access is what makes it possible on Linux (I think Ingo Molnar did most of the work on that.) Anything around 6ms or higher is too much. Maybe it's possible to have single-digit latency w/out an RT kernel, but I've never seen it.
I believe that real time kernel is simply theoretically incompatible w/ BSD's security model. Unless they can get the latency down to usable levels, it'll never work for my desktop.
It is interesting to think that education by vending machine is turning out to be so successful. I can understand how degrees by coursework can benefit from this. It will be interesting if universities with real brands will ever allow master or doctorates to be via online study. When I did my post grad degree, I saw my supervisor for an hour every week, and I know I was lucky at that. I had a friend who was doing his PhD which saw his supervisor for a grand total of 20 hours during his entire research project. He basically just was included as a name in the research papers, and copied in on any and all email correspondence. Even thought is becoming ever more automated these days.
Being merely CC'd on emails throughout the entirety of one's PhD sounds exactly like a doctorate via (almost) online study.
I felt exactly the same way for years. It's an incredibly frustrating perspective. There is a different one, but I only reached it after formally studying consumer law.
Keep in mind these are CREDIT agencies, and what that means. Credit is someone else is agreeing to loan you money, be it revolving (a credit card, for example) or intended for a specific purchase (home, car, etc.) If the friendly corner store owner is willing to let you pay him back next time b/c you forgot your wallet, they're also extending you credit. Banks, CC companies, and that store owner --creditors-- will want to have some way to gauge whether or not you'll actually pay them back.
The store owner has known you for years, but what about everyone else who doesn't know you at all? They need a way to assess your creditworthiness. When one's business involves extending credit to people (like you), that business need to be able to assess the likelihood of whether or not you'll pay them back as agreed.
Before credit agencies and credit scores, creditors (mostly banks) used their own changing criteria and investigations to determine whether or not a person was creditworthy. There's a lot to it, but cultural bias proved that creditors greatly, and consistently discriminated on the basis of sex, race, and other factors. (As for the store owners, well they'd just talk to each other, and rat out the local deadbeats. Stiff one merchant in a small, tight town, and good luck getting credit from any other merchant.) Ideally this would be an objective, nondiscriminatory, fair, formulaic approach. That's what the current regime of credit agencies and credit scores is intended to emulate.
So a credit report is just 7-year account of exactly the kind of information that creditors will want to know about you before they decide whether or not to give you money. While the information they collect is *about* you. It is not yours, any more than the fact that I saw you on the street with Bill the other day is "your" information, and you have some special privileges as to if and how I can share that. Similarly, credit agencies serve as an independent means for creditors to get the scoop on you for people who are trying to figure out if you'll pay as agreed, or if they'll lose money on you. If you didn't pay your credit card bill for three months in a row, it seems fair that any other credit card company (or other creditor) should be able to know about it.
It's more complex, obviously. Real harm can occur to consumers, particularly from false/inaccurate data. This is why you are able to dispute and add to your own credit report.
..how many of the people posting take this so lightly. There should be outrage here. Companies bearing weight on congress is not a good idea, people. Maybe many of you are too young to see what is going on, but the idea is that the country is governed by the people and for the people, not by Mr. Facebook for his company. And while you have 20 seconds of laugh writing a funny post, your future is eroding right in front of your eyes, and you are completely oblivious to it...
I understand your feelings, but when it comes down to it outrage isn't going to *do* anything about the problem of "companies bearing weight on congress." Love it or hate it, corporate influence on US government is a reality. That bell has already rung.
The reason that so many are just fine with corporate influence on Congress is that, well, corporations are people. I don't mean in the sense of legal recognition, I mean the CEO, the board, middle management, HR, accounting, and stakeholders -- these are all of-the-by-the people too, and they the right to organize themselves as they see fit. Corporate organization is one method of organization that people use to, intentionally influence Congress.
My concern is that generalizing this to some larger principle that "corporate influence on congress = bad" oversimplifies things. Because, despite the legions of lobbyists whose only target is money, there are actually other well-intended groups of (of-the-by-the) people who have used the corporate form as a method to organize and more effectively lobby Congress to address their own concerns.
Of course, *I* want f/b to have as little influence on legislation as possible --they could realistically do some serious damage to privacy statutes and regulations. But I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of somehow stripping of-the-by-the people of their rights to organize simply because they use a common form of business organization to be profitable. A lobby-specific approach seems more effective to me than just outrage. Perhaps outrage can inspire people to action, but most of the time I think it just adds stress that ultimately gets in the way.
It would be useful to keep a close eye on any upcoming amendments to privacy law, if you're not already. The Federal Register is the official daily publication of Congress, and will probably be the first place any f/b lobby influence appears. http://www.gpoaccess.gov/fr/
If you've never taken a moment to read your country's laws in raw form, I highly recommend it. Try a search for "privacy", and dive in. Note that most proposed regulations have a "request for comments." These comments eventually do become part of the official regulatory history. Unfortunately at this point --in part because let's face it, regs are kind of boring to read-- these comment sections are incredibly sparse, often containing only pre-canned statements from industry groups (coordinated by your favorite corporate lobby, of course). Next most often is individual commentary around the level of the youtube comment section.
You might be able to effectively focus your outrage here. But from what I've seen of regulatory history, the most effective comments are note outraged -- they are those that are calm (not angry), to the point with the person's concern, what they feel the effect of proposed reg would be, and light on the preaching, light on the adjectives, and light on the hyperbole -- preferably none of that noise, at all.
Why it will be like the wasteland it was 24/7 before they managed to provide cell service in BART trains a few years ago, good god!
Riding BART is already enough of a pain in the ass. If they have to shut it down to keep someone's "important political statement" from tying up my commute for an hour +, I am all fucking for it. Honestly people, I promise you: I do not want to hear how outraged you are at social injustices while I'm on the train. I probably just listened to ~8 hours of blowhard assholes all day, or am on my way to do so.
I am functioning on a level of coffee and egg sandwiches. It's not really prime ground for inspiring change.
Thing is that the 3DS, because it is a toy, has just a beautiful interface. It's even shinier and prettier than OSX.
It's maximized for neither efficiency nor speed, certainly. But the touchscreen interface reactions --the individualized chords built into button click reactions, for example-- are so detailed, they make you want to push all the buttons just to see how they respond. Lag is anticipated, and the meters are much better than multicolored spinning wheels or wildly disparate time estimates.
The controls are what you would expect from the company that developed the NES controller, after decades of further in-depth button, cross, trigger, and stick interface R&D. Even the tiny little volume slide seems like the braking touch was carefully developed. The media UI through the 3DS OS is much better than the minimum-acceptable-functionality that I can access from my couch with company-supplied VOD remotes. If I can end up using this as a remote, it would seem like top-shelf control hardware compared to those horrible rubber buttons.
I only bought this thing to play the Ocarina of Time. I managed to never play the original, and going through such a lauded game for the first time on overpriced hardware seems as indulgent as a spa or luxury mattress. So streaming Netflix was an unexpected bonus --even the new Chromebooks cannot, and they're running more than twice as much.
I'll cop to my own possible bias --I bought a 3DS early, and might be trying to psychologically overcompensate for getting socked the extra cash. The price dropped days after I bought mine; it blows no doubt. Especially b/c you could have both got it at the reduced price and made the "ambassador program", at least if you do it in the next few hours. (Free crap I'd have long ago downloaded elsewhere if I gave a crap about it. Nice to have undoubtedly legal copies of old libraries, I guess.)
The 3D thing made me dizzy after a minute and I mostly keep it off (except for the cut-scenes, because what the hell), but it's fun to play this, and I've gone a few hours at a stretch. It might easily turn out to be the most polished game for this OS, but polish the 3DS has in spades.
Books will become antiques and collectors items. If one looks at the 21 century information society, books have no place in it. Once all current books are scanned and fully digitized, any human on the planet with an internet connection will be able to access them. This is a powerful tool that is not fully realized. e-book technology is till in its infancy. You're also fooling yourself if you assume that a paper book is automatically superior to a digital version. A paper book only has one copy, is probably printed on cheap paper, supportable to moisture, mold, insect, natural disaster, fire... you name it. Books are perishable goods and none too portable. Digital information is forever and can be backed up infinitely.
=What your perspective overlooks is how advanced the technology of books has become. Paper, ink, printing, and binding are a self-evidently open design that has been refined over the course of dozens of centuries. The technology is relatively advanced and mature. OTOH, the equipment you appear to rely on is far more vulnerable to moisture, mold, insect, natural disasters, fire, EMPs, etc.
I agree that it's possible that books might eventually become obsolete antiques, but within 100 years will is much too soon. Digital technology needs several centuries to just begin to catch up with paper, ink, and glue.
An article Friday on the web site of one of the newspapers, La Libre, took issue with Google's interpretation.
"It is necessary to distinguish the Google search engine from the Google news service," the article said. "The news editors do not oppose having their content referenced by the Google search engine, they refuse on the other hand for their informational content to be included in Google News," the article said.
It seems as if the newspapers wish to impose their own, limited understanding of a service they use on the way a company does business. Based on that statement, it's difficult to determine exactly what the arrogance -to- ignorance ratio behind this litigation has been.
The biggest challege I faced living without a home internet connection was a lack of reference materials. A text dump of wikipedia is a good start, but also grab anything you have a professional interest in, e.g. all the O'Reilly books. Also a good home repair guide, your car manual, outdoor survival guide, medical texts, home chemistry book, cookbooks, karma sutra, and if you can get a dump of instructables or about.com or wikihow, you're probably pretty good. A general selection of science, art, literature, and philosophy texts should also not go amiss. For fiction, take a dump of Project Gutenberg and/or some large ebook torrents. Calibre is software designed to manage ebooks, specifically in relation to ebook readers, which it excels at, but it is also an excellent way to catelogue a large quantity of ebooks.
If you're into games, the biggest N64 rom was 64 MB (Conker's Bad Fur Day, Resident Evil), so every game and game system manufactured before the introduction of the Playstation should only be in the tens of gigabytes.
It almost goes without saying that you should store information about your online contacts.
It's difficult to predict what information you'll need. Good sources of information are rare, it's wise to have a technical library with a high degree of redundancy, i.e. multiple books on the same subject, especially if it is a subject of high interest or importance (e.g. emergency medicine). Data redundancy isn't a bad idea either.
Or, get and regularly use a library card.
Spamhaus did what sounds like just about the least they could bother to do in response --accept an offer of free legal representation. Kish spent three days back before the trial court looking more closely at that $11.7m number.
Then, he just let his client vary what he was asking for from $1m to $130m. It sounds as if Kish had just hired some flack "expert" to agree with the $11.7m figure, or *any* figure, he probably could have avoided this severe of a dressing-down. Any award still would have been appealed of course, as Spamhaus would just then in turn hire its own expert witnesses. But then this argument would have been a question of expert credibility, not a direct challenge to Kish's competency to practice law by probably the most prominent living federal appeals judge.
Posner says it right here:
When Kish noted that the damages request was later reduced to $30 million, Posner said "That's also preposterous," noting that it's hard to believe a company that never made more than $140,000 in a year could suffer damages that large. "How can a court be bothered with such pie-in-the-sky damages estimates without expert evidence?" he asked.
I see Apple iPhone ads almost ever other commercial break. Direct ones from apple, and carrier branded ones.. They are on constantly... I see giant Android signs up in malls.
Where is the MS Windows Phone Marketing?
I've seen a lot of MS Windows Phone ads on Hulu.
Why are you excluding fully cloud-based solutions? If the only reason is because you want local backup, I think you should reconsider using google docs. It immediately popped into my mind reading your description. If you're concerned about losing your material in the cloud, it's a trivial matter to create a local backup of all your docs. Fwiw, I just finished law school, and wound up using google docs to organize everything I had --text notes, journal articles, diagrams and scanned documents, even a handful of audio clips. It permits full-text & metadata search, tags, preserved the underlying files, and is cross-platform. If you have other reasons why you don't want a fully cloud-based solution, please describe them so we can better understand (and hopefully address) them.
The school's concern might have a sound basis. I think the admins who did this were more concerned about liability of ignoring a possible sign of next US school shooting than the subtle contours of the intersection between 1st Amendment law and public schools. Quality or message aside, the video does --objectively speaking-- open with scenes of violence. Arguably these scenes are (crudely) glorified. Who gives a shit? It's violent media, and it seems that even in the most heavily censored regimes, there is an acceptable level of violence from moderate to explicitly detailed. I don't believe the school would or should care whether there IS a link between real violence and creative output nearly as much as it would care that there MIGHT be a link. That would be the worst-case scenario here.
This just seems like basic business sense: don't enter into unprofitable agreements. The photographer put a limit on the number of these offers. It seems like a reasonable guess that he was better able to do the arithmetic than the article author, who is purely speculating that this came out to a net loss.
FTFA: "And they were made to promise that if they did, their families would only seek the legal minimum in damages."
So, there is some form of enforcement after all. The legality of this, I couldn't say.
I don't know if it applies to China -- I get the idea that China law is sold to the highest bidder, with discounts for nepotism. But in non-corrupt contract theory, one person does not have the capacity to contract away the rights of another, at least not as described here.