As far as Canada goes, at least you have 4 parties at the national level. I'd be happy as a clam if we had anything approaching the NDP here in the states. In your terms, we have a battle between the Conservative Party (Democrats) and the Christian Heritage Party (Republicans).
And yes, I'm aware that the Democrats are not conservatives. I'm just aware that the Canadian Conservative party is about as liberal as mainstream Democrats.
To be exact, I meant that you can get more care with the same amount of money by switching to a government-sponsored system. Our overhead with Medicare is, IIRC, about 3%. Most private insurers have overheads in the 20% range (again IIRC).
Numerous studies show that if we adopted a Canadian-style health care plan, we could cover everyone at a cost less than what we pay for Medicare now.
No need for kool-aid. Facts objectively show that government sponsored health care systems (as they have in Canada, the UK, and most of Europe) are more efficient than our private/public amalgamation here in the US.
Now, the real question is what you seek from your health care system. My goal is to see that people get the care they need without regard to their ability to pay. I hear concerns about waiting lists. Waiting lists are fine when you have to choose between waiting 2 weeks to see a doctor and not seeing him at all. Perhaps your goals are different than mine. Perhaps you enjoy the liberty of choosing your health insurance plan or have constitutional objections to universal health care. These are valid concerns.
What is not valid is the idea that the government cannot run health care programs when most other governments in the industrialized world have such programs and run them comparatively well.
Phoenix was literally just gecko + some ui and it was really really light and fast.
That sounds like Epiphany. I'd switch to Epiphany, but there isn't a rich library of extensions for it as there is for Iceweasel/Firefox. And, of course, there's always Dillo.
It's a vestigial leftover from the times where there was pretty much no such thing as non-commercial copyright infringement. IIRC, the $150,000 figure (for intentional infringement) was in the Copyright Act of 1976. Back then, infringing on copyright wasn't nearly as easy as it is today. I wasn't alive then, so I can't comment on how widespread audiovisual recording devices were at the time. I believe VCRs were starting to pick up steam. The penalty was high because most of the infringement was commercial and it took a sizable investment to infringe on a large scale.
Of course, there was no Internet (not as we think of it today), so the only way to distribute infringed works was to put it on a medium and then ship it somewhere.
It would make sense to change the statutory violation to something much smaller since non-commercial infringement is the rule rather than the exception. Even incidental infringement is still $200 per work infringed. That is to say if I recorded a tune and sent it to you and then you sent it to a friend, I could sue you for $200 and would most likely win.
Unfortunately, copyright law isn't as sexy as Iraq, abortion, or boys kissing, so it is not likely to be changed anytime soon. Which conservative here will vote for Dennis Kucinich if he had a sane copyright policy? Not bloody many I'm sure.
While the original author retains ownership of their code if it is added to Linux, this is not so for the GNU tools. AFAIK, the author has to assign their copyright to the FSF if they want their contribution added to any GNU project.
Nope. I'm from BFE north central ohio. I'm at college in Dayton, but I'm moving back to the area (Sandusky) because I enjoy small towns and my soon-to-be fiancee has a job in Sandusky.
IT jobs are few and far between up there, but there are jobs galore driving a truck.
Truck driving is becoming quite lucrative these days. Go find an outfit and have them train you. Many will pay for your CDL training if you sign on for X years.
You get to see the country and sit on your ass all day. I couldn't think of a much better job.
It's no secret that the parties flip sides every so often. I believe we're in the middle of such a flop right now. In 20 years the idea that Republicans are for personal responsibility and limited government would be insane.
Notice how the standard Republican line in the 80s and early 90s was that government was the problem, not the solution. Increased power to the states and deregulation was the key to success. Seeing as the Republicans were very often the minority in Congress, it made sense that they thought government (Democrats) was the problem. After they got the power, they realized they could use government as a tool to fix things they didn't like. In their case it was OMG HOMOS and other "values" issues.
This "big government conservatism" is what lost them the last election. Unless they get their shit together, its going be another 40 years before they control the House.
Then we'll get on the subject of why smokers congregate around doors that non-smokers need to use.
I think that my home state (Ohio) has probably the most comprehensive laws (PDF) in the country regarding smoking regulation. I especially enjoy the "door regulation" that specifies how far away from any entrance a smoker has to be when smoking.
I opt for 2, but that is what I'd do given my background and situation. I don't know if you have other obligations (family, debt, etc.) that effectively requires you to keep employment. In any case:
Write to your immediate supervisor asking to put his directive in writing. Keep a hard copy of this directive at home. Ask what the penalty is for not installing the software. Try to get this in writing as well. Contact a lawyer and see what remedies the law gives a person in your situation. I would think (or at least hope) that someone who is directed by his employer to do something illegal would at least be able to keep their job if they told the authorities or, better yet, were able to get part any financial settlement coming out of deals.
Of course, copyright infringement is a civil crime, so you can always go that route. Hell, give Microsoft a call or even the BSA. They might work out a deal with you.
Not all of us live in a perfect fantasy land where we can just quit jobs that offend our ethics. The guy probably has a family to support. Having to take care of other people lessens your ability to stand on principle.
Yeah, openSUSE. And then there'd be a flamewar about how Dell is still in bed with Microsoft.
Really, I expected it to be openSUSE for just that reason. Now, the question is how much Microsoft will retaliate with respect to Vista licences in the future.
Seeing as I don't buy computers (I buy parts and then assemble them), this doesn't affect me much, but all the same it's good that people are getting more choices.
No, its always been the case that you can break encryption for fair use reasons. You just can't tell anyone how you did it or distribute the software you used to do it.
So it is legal to use DVD Shrink, etc. It is just not legal to distribute it or (probably) tell anyone it exists.
I'm not sure from where you hail, but in my part of the country (Ohio), many people I know have electric water heaters. A poster in another thread spoke of his yearly electric bill of $320. I've known people to spend that in a month, easily.
When the sun sets and people turn on their lights, everyone is screwed?
Yes, because we haven't yet invented a way to store energy yet. Perhaps if you invented such a way, you might be rich. It'd stop me from having to turn the crank on my iPod, thats for sure.
Yeah, I can't testify to seeing any of that in 2004. I waited about an hour in the early afternoon in a largely Republican area (Fairborn, OH). AFAIK, local election boards ask for requests for machines from the SoS, who grants the allocations. As far as I know the local board allocates those machines as they see fit. So your problem is with Matt Damschroder (R), and his allocation of the machines in Franklin county.
Oddly enough, the general trend was more machines in rural (Republican) areas and less machines in urban (Democratic) areas. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide if this was random incompetence or a strategy to decrease urban turnout.
Yeah, I live in Ohio and know of Cuyahoga county's incredible incompetence. The entire board needs to be sent to a federal PMITA prison.
I was a recount observer in 2004, so I know a bit more than your average bear with respect to the process. We were given the official rules and procedures for how each machine was supposed to be operated in case of a recount. Especially interesting was the procedure for zeroing out a DRE machine. The board would put in a special memory card in order to zero out the machine and then run a report showing all races had been zeroed out. The document said that if the report did not run as expected to repeat the process as many times as is necessary. Nice.
Despite being of the opinion that Kerry > Bush (I actually voted for Badnarik, though), I can say that in the elections I monitored, all votes were counted correctly. I can't speak to any voter intimidation issues or anything like that, but I'm confident that the votes were counted correctly during the recounts. The only thing that bothered me was that in more than a few counties there were a different number of ballots counted during the recount than during the first count.
I've been saying something similar for a long time now. If at the end of the copyright term, a work is no longer available, that work has effectively been robbed from the public domain and has had unlimited copyright protection.
Lets assume its 2096 and Windows XP is now in the public domain (assuming copyrights are not retroactively extended again). What does that do for us? Well, someone somewhere *might* have an install disc. So we've got some binaries. We can't really modify and build upon that in any meaningful way, which is the point of copyright. Well maybe if we could find the source code, we could do something with it. Of course, who believes that anyone will have a copy of the source of Windows XP in 2096? Who thinks Microsoft has the source to Windows 1.0 sitting on a server somewhere?
Realistically, Microsoft gets unlimited copyright protection for something that, if we could possibly save for 95 years after it was released, can't be built upon in any meaningful sense. I agree that binaries need some sort of legal protection, but not full copyright. The founders never thought that it would be possible to make a useful tool of some sort without it being possible to see how the tool worked. We should change our copyright law to fix these problems.
Slashdot Mirror
We tend to vote against people here as well.
As far as Canada goes, at least you have 4 parties at the national level. I'd be happy as a clam if we had anything approaching the NDP here in the states. In your terms, we have a battle between the Conservative Party (Democrats) and the Christian Heritage Party (Republicans).
And yes, I'm aware that the Democrats are not conservatives. I'm just aware that the Canadian Conservative party is about as liberal as mainstream Democrats.
To be exact, I meant that you can get more care with the same amount of money by switching to a government-sponsored system. Our overhead with Medicare is, IIRC, about 3%. Most private insurers have overheads in the 20% range (again IIRC).
Numerous studies show that if we adopted a Canadian-style health care plan, we could cover everyone at a cost less than what we pay for Medicare now.
No need for kool-aid. Facts objectively show that government sponsored health care systems (as they have in Canada, the UK, and most of Europe) are more efficient than our private/public amalgamation here in the US.
Now, the real question is what you seek from your health care system. My goal is to see that people get the care they need without regard to their ability to pay. I hear concerns about waiting lists. Waiting lists are fine when you have to choose between waiting 2 weeks to see a doctor and not seeing him at all. Perhaps your goals are different than mine. Perhaps you enjoy the liberty of choosing your health insurance plan or have constitutional objections to universal health care. These are valid concerns.
What is not valid is the idea that the government cannot run health care programs when most other governments in the industrialized world have such programs and run them comparatively well.
It's a vestigial leftover from the times where there was pretty much no such thing as non-commercial copyright infringement. IIRC, the $150,000 figure (for intentional infringement) was in the Copyright Act of 1976. Back then, infringing on copyright wasn't nearly as easy as it is today. I wasn't alive then, so I can't comment on how widespread audiovisual recording devices were at the time. I believe VCRs were starting to pick up steam. The penalty was high because most of the infringement was commercial and it took a sizable investment to infringe on a large scale.
Of course, there was no Internet (not as we think of it today), so the only way to distribute infringed works was to put it on a medium and then ship it somewhere.
It would make sense to change the statutory violation to something much smaller since non-commercial infringement is the rule rather than the exception. Even incidental infringement is still $200 per work infringed. That is to say if I recorded a tune and sent it to you and then you sent it to a friend, I could sue you for $200 and would most likely win.
Unfortunately, copyright law isn't as sexy as Iraq, abortion, or boys kissing, so it is not likely to be changed anytime soon. Which conservative here will vote for Dennis Kucinich if he had a sane copyright policy? Not bloody many I'm sure.
While the original author retains ownership of their code if it is added to Linux, this is not so for the GNU tools. AFAIK, the author has to assign their copyright to the FSF if they want their contribution added to any GNU project.
No. Open Source is about making stuff work. Free Software is about ethics and freedom.
Yeah, it's disheartening, but he has a point. If I could choose who voted for me, I bet I could get re-elected until I died.
What ad?
Nope. I'm from BFE north central ohio. I'm at college in Dayton, but I'm moving back to the area (Sandusky) because I enjoy small towns and my soon-to-be fiancee has a job in Sandusky.
IT jobs are few and far between up there, but there are jobs galore driving a truck.
Truck driving is becoming quite lucrative these days. Go find an outfit and have them train you. Many will pay for your CDL training if you sign on for X years.
You get to see the country and sit on your ass all day. I couldn't think of a much better job.
It's no secret that the parties flip sides every so often. I believe we're in the middle of such a flop right now. In 20 years the idea that Republicans are for personal responsibility and limited government would be insane.
Notice how the standard Republican line in the 80s and early 90s was that government was the problem, not the solution. Increased power to the states and deregulation was the key to success. Seeing as the Republicans were very often the minority in Congress, it made sense that they thought government (Democrats) was the problem. After they got the power, they realized they could use government as a tool to fix things they didn't like. In their case it was OMG HOMOS and other "values" issues.
This "big government conservatism" is what lost them the last election. Unless they get their shit together, its going be another 40 years before they control the House.
We figured out how to do it in Ohio. It feels odd and also refreshing to not be asked "smoking or non-smoking" when I go into a restaurant.
From what it looks like, you have 3 options:
1) Quit
2) Turn them in
3) Do something unethical
I opt for 2, but that is what I'd do given my background and situation. I don't know if you have other obligations (family, debt, etc.) that effectively requires you to keep employment. In any case:
Write to your immediate supervisor asking to put his directive in writing. Keep a hard copy of this directive at home. Ask what the penalty is for not installing the software. Try to get this in writing as well. Contact a lawyer and see what remedies the law gives a person in your situation. I would think (or at least hope) that someone who is directed by his employer to do something illegal would at least be able to keep their job if they told the authorities or, better yet, were able to get part any financial settlement coming out of deals.
Of course, copyright infringement is a civil crime, so you can always go that route. Hell, give Microsoft a call or even the BSA. They might work out a deal with you.
Probably because the guy needs to eat.
Not all of us live in a perfect fantasy land where we can just quit jobs that offend our ethics. The guy probably has a family to support. Having to take care of other people lessens your ability to stand on principle.
Yeah, openSUSE. And then there'd be a flamewar about how Dell is still in bed with Microsoft.
Really, I expected it to be openSUSE for just that reason. Now, the question is how much Microsoft will retaliate with respect to Vista licences in the future.
Seeing as I don't buy computers (I buy parts and then assemble them), this doesn't affect me much, but all the same it's good that people are getting more choices.
No, its always been the case that you can break encryption for fair use reasons. You just can't tell anyone how you did it or distribute the software you used to do it.
So it is legal to use DVD Shrink, etc. It is just not legal to distribute it or (probably) tell anyone it exists.
I'm not sure from where you hail, but in my part of the country (Ohio), many people I know have electric water heaters. A poster in another thread spoke of his yearly electric bill of $320. I've known people to spend that in a month, easily.
Yeah, I can't testify to seeing any of that in 2004. I waited about an hour in the early afternoon in a largely Republican area (Fairborn, OH). AFAIK, local election boards ask for requests for machines from the SoS, who grants the allocations. As far as I know the local board allocates those machines as they see fit. So your problem is with Matt Damschroder (R), and his allocation of the machines in Franklin county.
Oddly enough, the general trend was more machines in rural (Republican) areas and less machines in urban (Democratic) areas. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide if this was random incompetence or a strategy to decrease urban turnout.
Yeah, I live in Ohio and know of Cuyahoga county's incredible incompetence. The entire board needs to be sent to a federal PMITA prison.
I was a recount observer in 2004, so I know a bit more than your average bear with respect to the process. We were given the official rules and procedures for how each machine was supposed to be operated in case of a recount. Especially interesting was the procedure for zeroing out a DRE machine. The board would put in a special memory card in order to zero out the machine and then run a report showing all races had been zeroed out. The document said that if the report did not run as expected to repeat the process as many times as is necessary. Nice.
Despite being of the opinion that Kerry > Bush (I actually voted for Badnarik, though), I can say that in the elections I monitored, all votes were counted correctly. I can't speak to any voter intimidation issues or anything like that, but I'm confident that the votes were counted correctly during the recounts. The only thing that bothered me was that in more than a few counties there were a different number of ballots counted during the recount than during the first count.
Well Dante puts him in the 8th circle of hell (fradulent) and the murderers and rapists in the 7th...
At times like these, I wish there was a hell so people like Jack Valenti could be sent to it.
Quite right.
I've been saying something similar for a long time now. If at the end of the copyright term, a work is no longer available, that work has effectively been robbed from the public domain and has had unlimited copyright protection.
Lets assume its 2096 and Windows XP is now in the public domain (assuming copyrights are not retroactively extended again). What does that do for us? Well, someone somewhere *might* have an install disc. So we've got some binaries. We can't really modify and build upon that in any meaningful way, which is the point of copyright. Well maybe if we could find the source code, we could do something with it. Of course, who believes that anyone will have a copy of the source of Windows XP in 2096? Who thinks Microsoft has the source to Windows 1.0 sitting on a server somewhere?
Realistically, Microsoft gets unlimited copyright protection for something that, if we could possibly save for 95 years after it was released, can't be built upon in any meaningful sense. I agree that binaries need some sort of legal protection, but not full copyright. The founders never thought that it would be possible to make a useful tool of some sort without it being possible to see how the tool worked. We should change our copyright law to fix these problems.