He's forced to resign because he and his wife accidentally maintained a joint checking account when he took office. If they'd kept separate accounts, you'd have found him to be just fine? Do you see how silly that sounds? But that's the matter over which he was just hounded from office. That's exactly why straightforward democracy is almost always a bad idea, and why a constitutional republic makes more sense. Checks and balances, not only between the branches of the government, but also between those branches (and those working in them) and angry, low-information mobs.
US contract laws favours companies over individual customers. That is what I said
No, you didn't. You said "corporations." Contract law makes no distinction in that regard. A contract is a mutually agreed-upon arrangement between two parties. Those parties could be any mix of individuals acting privately, individuals conducting business, a company formed by and involving only one person, or an organization of two people or two million people (or hundreds of millions of people... the government signs contracts too, right?). Contract law doesn't favor anyone agreeing to a contract, the contract spells out exactly who gets what under what circumstances.
All of your spinning about de facto results is just you back-pedaling because your initial assertion, as you know, is nonsense.
Why would a display need "massively networked online communication services"?
Because they're not selling it merely as a display. There's an entire ecosystem of services they're building around it - otherwise they would have to charge far, far more for the hardware. The $600 (ish) per device won't even put a dent their costs, otherwise. Just like that price won't come close to the competing products being developed at Microsoft and Magic Leap.
As has been pointed out, they will likely never even break even if everyone who's likely to buy a Rift or any similar device does buy it from them at $600. And that's assuming that the incredibly well funded Magic Leap and Microsoft, who are working on very viable competing products, don't take their expected shares of that market. And that companies like Sony, Samsung and the rest don't even get meaningfully involved. They'll have to charge way, way more for the Rift if only the actual hardware sales are going to make that product line financially viable.
The data harvesting clauses in this case are egregious and probably wouldn't be there if Oculus weren't owned by Facebook.
You're typing your thoughts on a web site, right now, that has essentially the exact same language in its TOS. It's boilerplate when running public-facing services and tools that do things like allowing you to publish your own words or things like avatars.
That's how they make their money. The need that to make money. They exist to make money.
So, as usual, fuck you, Facebook
So you're proposing that they provide untold billions of dollars worth of infrastructure to billions of people who use their services all day long, but make the money necessary to run all of that by... what? Selling decorative accent carpets, car washes, and whole grain muffins? Please be specific.
It's just a device. By the same logic, my camera would need similar clauses.
Are you using massively networked online communication services provided by Nikon (or Canon or Pentax or whoever) to make your photographs functionally useful? No? I see.
This trick only works in the US, though, which apparently has a contract law that is biased very strongly in favour of corporations.
No, those laws favor anybody, including you personally if you wish, who are creating things and offering services. You could be a one-man landscaping company, and include similar language in your contract if you wish, as it relates to your business need to show images of your creative work, even when your client has added things to it. And your prospective customers can agree to your terms, or just hire somebody else. Your OMG CORPORATEY INCORPORATED CORPORATIONS!!! scare word has nothing to do with it. It applies to mom-and-pop creative services and products just as much as it does to organizations of 5, 10 or 10,000 employees. And it's a contract, so it's negotiable. If nothing else, you have the ultimate negotiating power: take your money elsewhere. Don't like the Occulus stance? Buy from Magic Leap or Microsoft. Don't like theirs? Convinced there has to be way to produce such a product while not going bankrupt without requiring those contractual items? Then you're a new sort of genius and can surely attract the funding to start your own, better version of a company producing such tools. What are you waiting for?
It might be standard but I thought in most countries to be enforceable the agreement had to be made before purchase of the item. You can't sell the item to someone and then try to add a whole load of terms and conditions which were not readily visible on the outside of the box after you already agreed to the sale.
Which is why every one of these huge (or up and coming) technology companies provides you with free and easy access to their complete TOS documents on their web sites. You're free to examine them for as many hours or weeks as you like before doing any business with them whatsoever.
Internet and Web are capitalized because they refer to one specific internet or web, thus making them proper nouns. The best non-technical example is "mother". If you're talking about mothers in general, it's not capitalized: "A mother's job is never done." If you're talking about one specific mother, it's a proper noun and thus capitalized. "I wanted to have chocolate, but Mother said it would spoil my dinner." (Referring specifically to your mother.)
Nope. Do you say, "I've got to put more money in a bank so I can save for a house"... but then also say, "I"ve got to stop by my Bank in order to make a deposit." No, you don't. And I don't know anybody who types thusly: "My Mother and Father have been married for twenty years." Because those are NOT proper nouns. Though there are ways in which capitalizing such words make sense: as in, "I'm going to pour more tea. Can I offer you some, Mom?" Because you are substituting that word for their name while directly addressing them. And NOT doing so when you not doing so. As in: "I'm telling you, Dad, you have no idea how much my friend Jim dislikes his father." Note that neither "friend" nor "father" would be capitalized in that case, though they do refer to specific individuals.
Yeah, we don't want to label people. Words like "citizen" dehumanize, right? Or "taxpayer." That's awful. It it just makes the half of the country's population that does pay income taxes sounds like mere beasts of burden for the half that pay no income taxes.
Or maybe, just possibly, the point is that we use such labels when they are contextually useful? When we're talking about choices of haircut, immigration status isn't particularly meaningful. When we're talking about whether or not someone is benefiting from their presence in the US without doing the things that other law-abiding people did in order to get those benefits, mentioning the fact that they are in the country illegally is completely appropriate.
Why SHOULD someone who's decided to skip the line and avoid the legal requirements of proper immigration get empathy from those they're cheating? What's lazy and stereotyping about calling someone what they actually are, when the context of the discussion directly relates to their lawbreaking and what they get out of their choice to be such... and what other people who choose to follow the law must do, in contrast?
You've got your laziness label aimed at the wrong problem. The laziness comes from confusing race with culture, or confusing culture with personal choices to act. Those who use a label to describe the legal circumstances that someone deliberately chose to put themselves in aren't talking race, or culture, or gender or any of the other lights-progressives'-hair-on-fire PC third-rail topics. They're talking about a CHOICE people have made to break the law. Just like when they choose to hold up a liquor store or steal a car or profit from inside trading. That doesn't make them "other" in any sense other than what the phrase explicitly addresses: their choice to obey the law, or not. Have you chosen to break federal immigration law? No? Then you are in one category, and the people who HAVE chosen to break those laws are in another.
The real intellectual laziness and moral cowardice comes from trying to blur that distinction in order to avoid the personal discomfort of actually identifying someone's decision to break the law for what it is. The real question is: why does someone become uncomfortable identifying someone's actions for what they demonstrably are? Usually, it's because they're too craven to come out and say what they really want: open borders and a generous welfare state for anyone who shows up. Those who want that in the US are several years too slow watching how those policies have been turning out elsewhere.
It never made sense, to me, to capitalize "web" or "internet," so this is just finally getting it right. I do find "website" to be silly, though. It makes no more sense than "constructionsite" or "landingsite" or "accidentsite."
And why is "illegal immigrant" incorrect? Yes, the act of immigrating illegally is illegal. It puts the person who commits that crime into the condition of being an illegal immigrant. If someone is squatting in a house where they don't have permission to live, they are illegally residing in that house - they are illegal residents of that house. It's not like there's any semantic confusion on the subject. We talk very reasonably about people being legal residents, visa-holding travelers, etc. A phrase which defines their nature and status is perfectly reasonable. Someone either is, or is not an immigrant, and either is or is not such in keeping with immigration law. Immigration is a process 100% defined by law. One is either doing it legally, or not. Their status after doing it is within the provisions of the law, or outside it. They are legally residing in the country, or they are doing so illegally.
What's with the summary's "TM" tacked on? As if the phone in the San Bernadino case wasn't one that was used by an actual, real, murdering person who embarked on a terrorist attack? That was the very definition of a terrorist attack, making him an actual terrorist. Joking it up with a trademark symbol is joking about a mass murderer's very real, planned terroristic mass murdering in the name of his religion and in support of ISIS. We can argue which flavor of terrorist he was by adding other adjectives ("radical", "Islamist," "jihaddi" or what have you), but there's no question about the style and strategy of his attack: it was meant to be terrorism. That was his purpose (and his wife's). Maybe the summary should be altered to read:
Salvador Hernandez, reporting(TM) for BuzzFeed
Of note, in this particular case, the terror was so real that the/. editors couldn't manage to remember how to check for simple punctuation friendly to this platform before blessing the post. Either support unicode (I'm neutral on that), or just take a second to scrub the text. Or, where can I send a few lines of genius code I've come up with, which pre-processes submissions, automagically swapping strings representing curly quotes and apostrophes for universally accepted ones?
if a law has no basis in morality, it is unjust. "One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."
So, Boko Haram considers it immoral for girls to learn to read, because that's the way Allah wants it. So they kill the teachers and take the girls, selling them as sex slaves. But their morality says that's what they must do. Would you support the laws they would like to see put in place, given they have a strong moral backing?
No?
Right, because what you said is nonsense. Unless you qualify "moral" by explaining the underlying premises and means by which that particular moral code is derived from them, you're just blowing platitudes.
That's quite a claim to make. I woke up early today and it rained. It must rain every day I wake up early!
No, it's more like, "It frequently rains here, and when it does everyone gets wet. Until they have an umbrella, which reduces the odds of that happening."
Street crime in Florida dropped precipitously immediately following that state's concealed carry law allowing non-criminals to be armed. It wasn't because all the criminals suddenly went back to school and got really caught up in their French Literature studies.
The worst anyone says about Hillary really is that she might have committed a felony with the whole email thing
Actually, no. The worst thing that can be said about her is that she is a corrupt, serially lying manipulator who has operated as part of a family business that enriches them personally through the holding and exploiting of public office. And that everything she says about what makes her qualified for the job is 100% backwards (with regard to competence, past results, world view, and integrity). Her hypocrisy knows no bounds, and she truly considers herself to be above the law. The business with her casual treatment of above-top-secret compartmented intelligence on her home computer and her subsequent lying, stonewalling, foot-dragging and throwing-under-the-bus of her loyal vassals isn't THE problem, it's just another symptom of the suite of problems she and her husband so fully embody.
But otherwise, yes. The crazies are the problem. Given that reality at a large high-profile event, I'd leave it up to serious door security and professional armed guards, and tell attendees to leave the hardware in the car.
So you must be REALLY pissed at the current administration, with the even more family and golf trips and the even less useful bubble of underlings insulating the POTUS from reality.
No. You've got it completely wrong. You're parsing the plain language (but older-school punctuation) completely incorrectly.
In plainer (contemporary) language, the 2nd Amendment is saying: "Though we acknowledge the inevitability of a formal standing military presence, the existence of that military doesn't mean the government can prevent individual citizens from keeping and bearing arms." The founders REALLY didn't want a standing army, but they recognized that at least local militia units were going to be necessary. But they didn't want any local military authorities to presume that their official role as arms-bearers meant that they could prevent the local civilians from owning and using weapons. The people who wrote that amendment had just lived through the British military doing exactly that, and considered it vital to clarify that no military entity in the US would, by its existence, somehow make them (the military) the monopoly possessor of force and personal protection. This is all spelled out very clearly in the correspondence, debates, and supporting documents that surround the adoption of that amendment.
Americans need to learn the difference between communism and socialism. They're not the same thing.
True, they're not the same thing. Just the same in the way that really matters: some people are, by disposition, born being slaves to other people who, by disposition, get to own them. The more productive, innovative, and hard working you are, the more of a slave you are required to be. If the usual apologists for mere socialism are correct, then you're just a bit less of a slave in that more watered down version. Sort of like being kind of pregnant, I suppose.
So what you're saying is that you are intellectually incapable of actually talking substance. I get it. You don't want to let go of your vague innuendo and pointless hand-waving, because that would mean admitting that you don't really have a point to make, and that you're just trying to excuse away the behavior of a culture of murderers. It's not even worth pondering why you support their behavior, because they (and thus by extension, you) are fundamentally irrational. But your delusional references to things like "your superiors" help to illustrate how desperate you are to distract. Have fun in your fantasy world, but please abstain from doing anything dangerous, like voting in elections.
Slashdot Mirror
wow, they have a real accountable democracy
No, sounds more like mob rule.
He's forced to resign because he and his wife accidentally maintained a joint checking account when he took office. If they'd kept separate accounts, you'd have found him to be just fine? Do you see how silly that sounds? But that's the matter over which he was just hounded from office. That's exactly why straightforward democracy is almost always a bad idea, and why a constitutional republic makes more sense. Checks and balances, not only between the branches of the government, but also between those branches (and those working in them) and angry, low-information mobs.
Whiskey is more or less renewable, so that follows.
US contract laws favours companies over individual customers. That is what I said
No, you didn't. You said "corporations." Contract law makes no distinction in that regard. A contract is a mutually agreed-upon arrangement between two parties. Those parties could be any mix of individuals acting privately, individuals conducting business, a company formed by and involving only one person, or an organization of two people or two million people (or hundreds of millions of people ... the government signs contracts too, right?). Contract law doesn't favor anyone agreeing to a contract, the contract spells out exactly who gets what under what circumstances.
All of your spinning about de facto results is just you back-pedaling because your initial assertion, as you know, is nonsense.
Why would a display need "massively networked online communication services"?
Because they're not selling it merely as a display. There's an entire ecosystem of services they're building around it - otherwise they would have to charge far, far more for the hardware. The $600 (ish) per device won't even put a dent their costs, otherwise. Just like that price won't come close to the competing products being developed at Microsoft and Magic Leap.
The data harvesting clauses in this case are egregious and probably wouldn't be there if Oculus weren't owned by Facebook.
You're typing your thoughts on a web site, right now, that has essentially the exact same language in its TOS. It's boilerplate when running public-facing services and tools that do things like allowing you to publish your own words or things like avatars.
That's how they make their money. The need that to make money. They exist to make money.
So, as usual, fuck you, Facebook
So you're proposing that they provide untold billions of dollars worth of infrastructure to billions of people who use their services all day long, but make the money necessary to run all of that by ... what? Selling decorative accent carpets, car washes, and whole grain muffins? Please be specific.
It's just a device. By the same logic, my camera would need similar clauses.
Are you using massively networked online communication services provided by Nikon (or Canon or Pentax or whoever) to make your photographs functionally useful? No? I see.
This trick only works in the US, though, which apparently has a contract law that is biased very strongly in favour of corporations.
No, those laws favor anybody, including you personally if you wish, who are creating things and offering services. You could be a one-man landscaping company, and include similar language in your contract if you wish, as it relates to your business need to show images of your creative work, even when your client has added things to it. And your prospective customers can agree to your terms, or just hire somebody else. Your OMG CORPORATEY INCORPORATED CORPORATIONS!!! scare word has nothing to do with it. It applies to mom-and-pop creative services and products just as much as it does to organizations of 5, 10 or 10,000 employees. And it's a contract, so it's negotiable. If nothing else, you have the ultimate negotiating power: take your money elsewhere. Don't like the Occulus stance? Buy from Magic Leap or Microsoft. Don't like theirs? Convinced there has to be way to produce such a product while not going bankrupt without requiring those contractual items? Then you're a new sort of genius and can surely attract the funding to start your own, better version of a company producing such tools. What are you waiting for?
It might be standard but I thought in most countries to be enforceable the agreement had to be made before purchase of the item. You can't sell the item to someone and then try to add a whole load of terms and conditions which were not readily visible on the outside of the box after you already agreed to the sale.
Which is why every one of these huge (or up and coming) technology companies provides you with free and easy access to their complete TOS documents on their web sites. You're free to examine them for as many hours or weeks as you like before doing any business with them whatsoever.
Internet and Web are capitalized because they refer to one specific internet or web, thus making them proper nouns. The best non-technical example is "mother". If you're talking about mothers in general, it's not capitalized: "A mother's job is never done." If you're talking about one specific mother, it's a proper noun and thus capitalized. "I wanted to have chocolate, but Mother said it would spoil my dinner." (Referring specifically to your mother.)
Nope. Do you say, "I've got to put more money in a bank so I can save for a house" ... but then also say, "I"ve got to stop by my Bank in order to make a deposit." No, you don't. And I don't know anybody who types thusly: "My Mother and Father have been married for twenty years." Because those are NOT proper nouns. Though there are ways in which capitalizing such words make sense: as in, "I'm going to pour more tea. Can I offer you some, Mom?" Because you are substituting that word for their name while directly addressing them. And NOT doing so when you not doing so. As in: "I'm telling you, Dad, you have no idea how much my friend Jim dislikes his father." Note that neither "friend" nor "father" would be capitalized in that case, though they do refer to specific individuals.
You're wondering how rational someone is about their choices about destroying evidence when they left a bomb factory in their house? Really?
Yeah, we don't want to label people. Words like "citizen" dehumanize, right? Or "taxpayer." That's awful. It it just makes the half of the country's population that does pay income taxes sounds like mere beasts of burden for the half that pay no income taxes.
... and what other people who choose to follow the law must do, in contrast?
Or maybe, just possibly, the point is that we use such labels when they are contextually useful? When we're talking about choices of haircut, immigration status isn't particularly meaningful. When we're talking about whether or not someone is benefiting from their presence in the US without doing the things that other law-abiding people did in order to get those benefits, mentioning the fact that they are in the country illegally is completely appropriate.
Why SHOULD someone who's decided to skip the line and avoid the legal requirements of proper immigration get empathy from those they're cheating? What's lazy and stereotyping about calling someone what they actually are, when the context of the discussion directly relates to their lawbreaking and what they get out of their choice to be such
You've got your laziness label aimed at the wrong problem. The laziness comes from confusing race with culture, or confusing culture with personal choices to act. Those who use a label to describe the legal circumstances that someone deliberately chose to put themselves in aren't talking race, or culture, or gender or any of the other lights-progressives'-hair-on-fire PC third-rail topics. They're talking about a CHOICE people have made to break the law. Just like when they choose to hold up a liquor store or steal a car or profit from inside trading. That doesn't make them "other" in any sense other than what the phrase explicitly addresses: their choice to obey the law, or not. Have you chosen to break federal immigration law? No? Then you are in one category, and the people who HAVE chosen to break those laws are in another.
The real intellectual laziness and moral cowardice comes from trying to blur that distinction in order to avoid the personal discomfort of actually identifying someone's decision to break the law for what it is. The real question is: why does someone become uncomfortable identifying someone's actions for what they demonstrably are? Usually, it's because they're too craven to come out and say what they really want: open borders and a generous welfare state for anyone who shows up. Those who want that in the US are several years too slow watching how those policies have been turning out elsewhere.
It never made sense, to me, to capitalize "web" or "internet," so this is just finally getting it right. I do find "website" to be silly, though. It makes no more sense than "constructionsite" or "landingsite" or "accidentsite."
And why is "illegal immigrant" incorrect? Yes, the act of immigrating illegally is illegal. It puts the person who commits that crime into the condition of being an illegal immigrant. If someone is squatting in a house where they don't have permission to live, they are illegally residing in that house - they are illegal residents of that house. It's not like there's any semantic confusion on the subject. We talk very reasonably about people being legal residents, visa-holding travelers, etc. A phrase which defines their nature and status is perfectly reasonable. Someone either is, or is not an immigrant, and either is or is not such in keeping with immigration law. Immigration is a process 100% defined by law. One is either doing it legally, or not. Their status after doing it is within the provisions of the law, or outside it. They are legally residing in the country, or they are doing so illegally.
Salvador Hernandez, reporting(TM) for BuzzFeed
Of note, in this particular case, the terror was so real that the /. editors couldn't manage to remember how to check for simple punctuation friendly to this platform before blessing the post. Either support unicode (I'm neutral on that), or just take a second to scrub the text. Or, where can I send a few lines of genius code I've come up with, which pre-processes submissions, automagically swapping strings representing curly quotes and apostrophes for universally accepted ones?
if a law has no basis in morality, it is unjust. "One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."
So, Boko Haram considers it immoral for girls to learn to read, because that's the way Allah wants it. So they kill the teachers and take the girls, selling them as sex slaves. But their morality says that's what they must do. Would you support the laws they would like to see put in place, given they have a strong moral backing?
No?
Right, because what you said is nonsense. Unless you qualify "moral" by explaining the underlying premises and means by which that particular moral code is derived from them, you're just blowing platitudes.
It wasn't the only thing that changed.
That's true. There was also a drop in armed robberies in businesses, coinciding with more business owners defending themselves.
That's quite a claim to make. I woke up early today and it rained. It must rain every day I wake up early!
No, it's more like, "It frequently rains here, and when it does everyone gets wet. Until they have an umbrella, which reduces the odds of that happening."
Street crime in Florida dropped precipitously immediately following that state's concealed carry law allowing non-criminals to be armed. It wasn't because all the criminals suddenly went back to school and got really caught up in their French Literature studies.
aggro
Please stop that.
The worst anyone says about Hillary really is that she might have committed a felony with the whole email thing
Actually, no. The worst thing that can be said about her is that she is a corrupt, serially lying manipulator who has operated as part of a family business that enriches them personally through the holding and exploiting of public office. And that everything she says about what makes her qualified for the job is 100% backwards (with regard to competence, past results, world view, and integrity). Her hypocrisy knows no bounds, and she truly considers herself to be above the law. The business with her casual treatment of above-top-secret compartmented intelligence on her home computer and her subsequent lying, stonewalling, foot-dragging and throwing-under-the-bus of her loyal vassals isn't THE problem, it's just another symptom of the suite of problems she and her husband so fully embody.
But otherwise, yes. The crazies are the problem. Given that reality at a large high-profile event, I'd leave it up to serious door security and professional armed guards, and tell attendees to leave the hardware in the car.
So you must be REALLY pissed at the current administration, with the even more family and golf trips and the even less useful bubble of underlings insulating the POTUS from reality.
No. You've got it completely wrong. You're parsing the plain language (but older-school punctuation) completely incorrectly.
In plainer (contemporary) language, the 2nd Amendment is saying: "Though we acknowledge the inevitability of a formal standing military presence, the existence of that military doesn't mean the government can prevent individual citizens from keeping and bearing arms." The founders REALLY didn't want a standing army, but they recognized that at least local militia units were going to be necessary. But they didn't want any local military authorities to presume that their official role as arms-bearers meant that they could prevent the local civilians from owning and using weapons. The people who wrote that amendment had just lived through the British military doing exactly that, and considered it vital to clarify that no military entity in the US would, by its existence, somehow make them (the military) the monopoly possessor of force and personal protection. This is all spelled out very clearly in the correspondence, debates, and supporting documents that surround the adoption of that amendment.
Sounds like Belgium and Turkey were following the lead of George Bush and ignoring the problem.
So your problem is that, a few months into office, Bush didn't change Clinton's policies fast enough?
Americans need to learn the difference between communism and socialism. They're not the same thing.
True, they're not the same thing. Just the same in the way that really matters: some people are, by disposition, born being slaves to other people who, by disposition, get to own them. The more productive, innovative, and hard working you are, the more of a slave you are required to be. If the usual apologists for mere socialism are correct, then you're just a bit less of a slave in that more watered down version. Sort of like being kind of pregnant, I suppose.
So what you're saying is that you are intellectually incapable of actually talking substance. I get it. You don't want to let go of your vague innuendo and pointless hand-waving, because that would mean admitting that you don't really have a point to make, and that you're just trying to excuse away the behavior of a culture of murderers. It's not even worth pondering why you support their behavior, because they (and thus by extension, you) are fundamentally irrational. But your delusional references to things like "your superiors" help to illustrate how desperate you are to distract. Have fun in your fantasy world, but please abstain from doing anything dangerous, like voting in elections.