If you don't actually believe in either of the two candidates, then find a third party who is closer to your ideals. If nothing else, you help that third part get a little bit closer to the 10% they need to get matching funds and general respect by the media. Its not much, sure... but its something.
If everyone who has actually said "I wouldn't vote for either of these two guys" actually voted for a third party, it would be enough to shake things up a bit. Everyone just needs to do their part.
I dug around because I could not get a straight answer on who actually has to pay this licensing fee. And after digging through various government documents, it appears that this fee is only needed to be paid if you do not have another license to play the music. So basically, in exchange for being able to broadcast any song that you want over the internet (including RIAA owned songs/artists), you must abide by these (possibly crazy) fees.
If web radio truly wants to be independent, they should use this as an opportunity to break away from the shackles of the RIAA. They can/should make agreements with local bands or truly independent labels for web broadcast. This way they can broadcast and give exposure to independent artists, while at the same time avoiding the extreme licensing fees from the mandatory license. I would expect that these rights would come relatively cheaply as most local groups would love the chance to get some free/cheap exposure and drive up their concerts and album sales (which is what I have heard from the slash-mob is what the radio should be used for).
By forcing this through, RIAA may have just ceded webradio to independent artists. Those who are with it enough to be listening to web radio and care about this day of silence should be open enough to be willing to trade away listening to Britney on the web for music of actual quality.
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
It only allows protection against criminal matters. Nowhere does it mention a protection against civil action. The government can force you to testify in a civil case as it not prohibited in the amendment.
I agree with you for the most part, but I do think that using computers in a limited fashion can really help the system. The system that is used in Southern Wisconsin (and other parts of the midwest) I have yet to find a flaw in:
1) You recieve a paper ballot after being checked against a paper list of names and addresses.
2) You take a felt marker, and draw the line between the pre-printed tip and tail of the "arrow" that is pointing to the candidate you want to vote for.
3) If you make a mistake (registering Democrat, and voting in a Republican Primary for example) the electronic ballot box refuses to take the ballot. You are given 3 ballots if needed to correct mistakes.
4) The ballots are machine readable, thus enabling automated counting.
Thus you are left with:
1) A paper record of who showed up to vote
2) A nameless paper ballot with a full record of the vote which can be hand-counted if necessary
Done and done... Why a method like this isn't adopted nationwide, I have no clue.
Why would you expect an academic advisor (I am assuming you are talking about a graduate school type situation) to be willing to co-sign a loan, or any other sort of financial transaction for you? They are essentially a coworker or boss, depending on the personal relationship. Would you ask your boss or the guy in the next cubicle to trust his money to you and risk paying hundreds or thousands of dollars if you just decide to run off?
It isn't a matter of trust, it's a matter of keeping your personal life seperate from your professional life. Expecting an advisor to back you on any sort of loan is way over that line.
I think you misspelled RIAA in a few spots... let me help you out:
- It's against RIAA's license agreement for RIAAMusic to run on non-RiAA hadrware (I know some people don't care about the license agreement at all),
- There is no way to purchase a standalone copy of RIAA Music, meaning it must be pirated (and no, I don't believe people are buying RIAA Licenced Players and then "retiring" the RIAA license from it completely and using only Open-Music on their RIAA Licenced Players, and the RIAA Licence on their non-RIAA hardware),
- Running RIAAMusic on non-RIAA hardware requires running it in a terribly hacked and un-updateable (at least via Music Update under most circumstances) state, with the content modified in an unknown fashion,
- RIAA has invested billions of dollars and tens of thousands of manhours into the development and support of the RIAAMusic, which is designed to promote the sale of RIAA products, and pirating it and using it on non-RIAA hardware kind of flies in the face of that?
Apparently you just have not hung around here long enough to realize that none of the above seem to bother people.
I agree that its more historical than anything else, but in a slightly different way. There are a bunch of physical 'laws' and then a bunch of mathematical 'laws' that have found their way into the physical sciences. Gauss was arguably more of a mathematician than a physicist, and Gauss' Law is simply a mathematical proof that if certain conditions apply to a system, then other things must be true mathematically.
Then there are physical laws such as the Lorentz Force Law [F=q(V X B)] which have no real proof that they are correct. The best that we can say about them is that it holds up in every single situation that we have applied it to. This even applies to things such as energy conservation. We have no proof that energy conservation must be universal, other than the fact that it works in everything we have seen. Then there are the Laws of Thermodynamics, the bulk of which depend on energy conservation.
So what we are left with is a odd mix-match of 'laws', some of which are mathematically provable given some assumptions about the working of the system, and others which are observed constantly observed and assumed universal.
Fair Enough... I was wrong, Dark Energy does interact gravitationally. I was just hoping to skirt the fact that something that interacts gravitationally actually results in a 'negative pressure' effect on the universe. I didnt want to go into all of that...
But you said it yourself, about 70% of the universe is comprised of Dark 'Energy'. This is not considered mass because it doesn't interact gravitationally. Dark Energy is currently more of a wild card than dark matter. It is something that seems to be the driving factor in the expansion of the universe... but no one is really sure what it "is".
But in short, the BBC is correct, about 85% of matter is Dark Matter, eventhough matter only comprises 30% of the total energy budget of the universe.
Well, he isn't the only one who doesn't have a basic grasp of astrophysics. A orbital distance of 1AU will only yield a 1 year orbit if the mass of one of the objects is negligable compared to the other. Since the consideration here is something on the scale of a Brown Dwarf (3-5% of the mass of the Sun), the lesser mass cannot be neglected in the calculation of the Reduced Mass (which is used to solve the Two-Body Problem). The rotation period does depend on both of the bodies because they work into the reduced mass.
A line item veto can get out of hand and become really silly if given enough time aswell. Wisconsin has had the Line-Item veto for a long time, and former Governor (and former HHS secretary) Thompson had a knack for what was known as 'The Wheel of Fortune Veto' around those parts.
He would regularly take out words such as "not" or edit the phrase "Program X gets $A dollars of funding, and Program Y gets $B dollars of funding" to "Program X gets $AB Dollars of funding". We dont need that silly "dollars of funding, and Program Y gets $". Or just remove the "not" in 'the state may not raise taxes'. Other days he would get creative and just completely slice and dice words apart and together to create statements that were nowhere near the original passage of the bill.
Then it takes a 2/3 vote to override the veto, which of course is nearly impossible to do, especially in Washington.
Entrapment by the Police will cause the charges against you to get thrown out. There is nothing illegal about it, persay. No police officer will go to jail for entraping you.
Now granted, RIAA isnt the police so they are not covered by this. However, I think that it would still be a valid practice if they were. Entrapment basically says that you cannot force someone into doing what they would not do normally and then charge them with it. Here, RIAA is just causing the normal course of action to take place on a p2p server and logging it.
Very similar to a prostitute sting operation where the officer causes the prostitute to proposition sex for money in the normal course of her actions.
Generally, avoid any game featuring a young black man wielding a shotgun on the cover.
Now, I understand what they are saying here, but why the inclusion specifically of the black young man holding a shotgun? I suppose if the same game featured a young white inner-city youth roaming the mean streets, or a latino kid, the game would be ok to pick up and enjoy?
I know (hoping at least) that they meant that if you see anything like a GTA knockoff its not going to be a decent game. I agree with that, but the specific inclusion of a specific race into their "bad games" definition is a bit much, IMO.
Most Wisconsin counties already have a system like this. Basically you connect the Tail and the Head of arrow with a marker to make your vote. Even better, if you cast an improper ballot (Voted for two people, or marked a line between a tail and a different head) the machine will reject your ballot, and you will be given another one to vote properly with.
Then at the end of the day, the box prints out the results for that specific polling place, and the vote are added. Relatively fool-proof.
I can do you one better on the Geek-o-meter:
House Lyrandar is actually the house that make the airships. Khorvaire is the name of the main central continent.
Last time I checked, as long as your actions are off the clock, and do not directly impact the day to day operations of the company, the company CANNOT take retributive action against you simply for organizing a union.
Granted, it is very very difficult to prove that you were fired only for organizing a union. There have been rumblings for a long time that anyone who attempted to unionize Wal-Mart workers have been summarily fired, but of course no one has been able to prove it.
Non-compete laws are acutally quite reasonable if you look into them. First, they must be reasonable in the eyes of a Judge. While Im sure many people will object to such a subjective standard, it is what we have judges there to do. An agreement of not being able to work for another software developer ever is clearly unreasonable and would be laughed out of the courtroom. Something that says you cant work for a competitor for a 6 month period as a fear of unfairly damageing the company due to inside information would most likely be considered reasonable. It doesnt say that you cannot program, or make a living, but not with a competitor.
Even an agreement that says you cant program for someone else, period would be instantly thrown out of court. This is simply allowing companies some protection of their company's vital information leaking to competitors.
If the shoe was on the other foot, and a Google employee went to Microsoft and managed to get the jump on Google's X number of projects, Im sure there would be a lot of support for non-competition agreement.
But the last time I checked, DeCSS was a dubious procedure at best. With the DMCA, everytime you use DeCSS you are committing a federal felony by breaking a form of digital encryption. A handful of major Linux distributions have stopped supporting DVD playback in their "out of the box" distribution for this concern.
Yes Linux will play it, but it will be illegal. Im sure the same can be said about a windows user who goes to similar lengths to play a movie through one of these new encryptions.
In Michigan you would be ok seeing as it includes this clause:
(5) The sending of a message described in subsection (1) is prohibited
only if it is otherwise a crime for the minor to purchase, view,
possess, participate in, or otherwise receive the product or service.
This is of course provided that they are actually kids toys that you are selling.
The problem here though, is that McDonalds has never made the impression to anyone that they sell steak. Its like asking Adobe for full documentation on Windows; they have no idea.
Wouldnt full specifications from McDonalds actually be them telling you exactly what is in each Quarter-Pounder with Cheese, and exactly what happens behind the scenes when they cook it?
I dont know about you, but I think those are some specifications that are better left unreleased.
You can think of it as "The Un-Official Scooby-Doo" game. The premise is that the players are exploring a haunted house. About halfway through the game, one of the players is randomly determined to be the traitor who now usually becomes the adversary. I say usually because there are 40 different betrayal scenarios based on which items have been discovered, and where they were discovered. Each game runs about 45-60 mins, and because of the multiple scenarios, you can play this game all night.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm going to grab a Mountain Dew because I need a coke to wash down my burger and fries"?
I see you have never been to the south before.
If you don't actually believe in either of the two candidates, then find a third party who is closer to your ideals. If nothing else, you help that third part get a little bit closer to the 10% they need to get matching funds and general respect by the media. Its not much, sure... but its something.
If everyone who has actually said "I wouldn't vote for either of these two guys" actually voted for a third party, it would be enough to shake things up a bit. Everyone just needs to do their part.
No, no. It is software from Redmond running on Windows that you have to be concerned about. The R's get confusing, I know.
I dug around because I could not get a straight answer on who actually has to pay this licensing fee. And after digging through various government documents, it appears that this fee is only needed to be paid if you do not have another license to play the music. So basically, in exchange for being able to broadcast any song that you want over the internet (including RIAA owned songs/artists), you must abide by these (possibly crazy) fees.
If web radio truly wants to be independent, they should use this as an opportunity to break away from the shackles of the RIAA. They can/should make agreements with local bands or truly independent labels for web broadcast. This way they can broadcast and give exposure to independent artists, while at the same time avoiding the extreme licensing fees from the mandatory license. I would expect that these rights would come relatively cheaply as most local groups would love the chance to get some free/cheap exposure and drive up their concerts and album sales (which is what I have heard from the slash-mob is what the radio should be used for).
By forcing this through, RIAA may have just ceded webradio to independent artists. Those who are with it enough to be listening to web radio and care about this day of silence should be open enough to be willing to trade away listening to Britney on the web for music of actual quality.
Simply read the amendment:
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
It only allows protection against criminal matters. Nowhere does it mention a protection against civil action. The government can force you to testify in a civil case as it not prohibited in the amendment.
I agree with you for the most part, but I do think that using computers in a limited fashion can really help the system. The system that is used in Southern Wisconsin (and other parts of the midwest) I have yet to find a flaw in:
1) You recieve a paper ballot after being checked against a paper list of names and addresses.
2) You take a felt marker, and draw the line between the pre-printed tip and tail of the "arrow" that is pointing to the candidate you want to vote for.
3) If you make a mistake (registering Democrat, and voting in a Republican Primary for example) the electronic ballot box refuses to take the ballot. You are given 3 ballots if needed to correct mistakes.
4) The ballots are machine readable, thus enabling automated counting.
Thus you are left with:
1) A paper record of who showed up to vote
2) A nameless paper ballot with a full record of the vote which can be hand-counted if necessary
Done and done... Why a method like this isn't adopted nationwide, I have no clue.
Why would you expect an academic advisor (I am assuming you are talking about a graduate school type situation) to be willing to co-sign a loan, or any other sort of financial transaction for you? They are essentially a coworker or boss, depending on the personal relationship. Would you ask your boss or the guy in the next cubicle to trust his money to you and risk paying hundreds or thousands of dollars if you just decide to run off? It isn't a matter of trust, it's a matter of keeping your personal life seperate from your professional life. Expecting an advisor to back you on any sort of loan is way over that line.
I think you misspelled RIAA in a few spots... let me help you out:
- It's against RIAA's license agreement for RIAAMusic to run on non-RiAA hadrware (I know some people don't care about the license agreement at all),
- There is no way to purchase a standalone copy of RIAA Music, meaning it must be pirated (and no, I don't believe people are buying RIAA Licenced Players and then "retiring" the RIAA license from it completely and using only Open-Music on their RIAA Licenced Players, and the RIAA Licence on their non-RIAA hardware),
- Running RIAAMusic on non-RIAA hardware requires running it in a terribly hacked and un-updateable (at least via Music Update under most circumstances) state, with the content modified in an unknown fashion,
- RIAA has invested billions of dollars and tens of thousands of manhours into the development and support of the RIAAMusic, which is designed to promote the sale of RIAA products, and pirating it and using it on non-RIAA hardware kind of flies in the face of that?
Apparently you just have not hung around here long enough to realize that none of the above seem to bother people.
I agree that its more historical than anything else, but in a slightly different way. There are a bunch of physical 'laws' and then a bunch of mathematical 'laws' that have found their way into the physical sciences. Gauss was arguably more of a mathematician than a physicist, and Gauss' Law is simply a mathematical proof that if certain conditions apply to a system, then other things must be true mathematically.
Then there are physical laws such as the Lorentz Force Law [F=q(V X B)] which have no real proof that they are correct. The best that we can say about them is that it holds up in every single situation that we have applied it to. This even applies to things such as energy conservation. We have no proof that energy conservation must be universal, other than the fact that it works in everything we have seen. Then there are the Laws of Thermodynamics, the bulk of which depend on energy conservation.
So what we are left with is a odd mix-match of 'laws', some of which are mathematically provable given some assumptions about the working of the system, and others which are observed constantly observed and assumed universal.
Fair Enough... I was wrong, Dark Energy does interact gravitationally. I was just hoping to skirt the fact that something that interacts gravitationally actually results in a 'negative pressure' effect on the universe. I didnt want to go into all of that...
But you said it yourself, about 70% of the universe is comprised of Dark 'Energy'. This is not considered mass because it doesn't interact gravitationally. Dark Energy is currently more of a wild card than dark matter. It is something that seems to be the driving factor in the expansion of the universe... but no one is really sure what it "is".
But in short, the BBC is correct, about 85% of matter is Dark Matter, eventhough matter only comprises 30% of the total energy budget of the universe.
Well, he isn't the only one who doesn't have a basic grasp of astrophysics. A orbital distance of 1AU will only yield a 1 year orbit if the mass of one of the objects is negligable compared to the other. Since the consideration here is something on the scale of a Brown Dwarf (3-5% of the mass of the Sun), the lesser mass cannot be neglected in the calculation of the Reduced Mass (which is used to solve the Two-Body Problem). The rotation period does depend on both of the bodies because they work into the reduced mass.
A line item veto can get out of hand and become really silly if given enough time aswell. Wisconsin has had the Line-Item veto for a long time, and former Governor (and former HHS secretary) Thompson had a knack for what was known as 'The Wheel of Fortune Veto' around those parts.
He would regularly take out words such as "not" or edit the phrase "Program X gets $A dollars of funding, and Program Y gets $B dollars of funding" to "Program X gets $AB Dollars of funding". We dont need that silly "dollars of funding, and Program Y gets $". Or just remove the "not" in 'the state may not raise taxes'. Other days he would get creative and just completely slice and dice words apart and together to create statements that were nowhere near the original passage of the bill.
Then it takes a 2/3 vote to override the veto, which of course is nearly impossible to do, especially in Washington.
Entrapment by the Police will cause the charges against you to get thrown out. There is nothing illegal about it, persay. No police officer will go to jail for entraping you. Now granted, RIAA isnt the police so they are not covered by this. However, I think that it would still be a valid practice if they were. Entrapment basically says that you cannot force someone into doing what they would not do normally and then charge them with it. Here, RIAA is just causing the normal course of action to take place on a p2p server and logging it. Very similar to a prostitute sting operation where the officer causes the prostitute to proposition sex for money in the normal course of her actions.
I know (hoping at least) that they meant that if you see anything like a GTA knockoff its not going to be a decent game. I agree with that, but the specific inclusion of a specific race into their "bad games" definition is a bit much, IMO.
Most Wisconsin counties already have a system like this. Basically you connect the Tail and the Head of arrow with a marker to make your vote. Even better, if you cast an improper ballot (Voted for two people, or marked a line between a tail and a different head) the machine will reject your ballot, and you will be given another one to vote properly with. Then at the end of the day, the box prints out the results for that specific polling place, and the vote are added. Relatively fool-proof.
I can do you one better on the Geek-o-meter: House Lyrandar is actually the house that make the airships. Khorvaire is the name of the main central continent.
Last time I checked, as long as your actions are off the clock, and do not directly impact the day to day operations of the company, the company CANNOT take retributive action against you simply for organizing a union.
Granted, it is very very difficult to prove that you were fired only for organizing a union. There have been rumblings for a long time that anyone who attempted to unionize Wal-Mart workers have been summarily fired, but of course no one has been able to prove it.
Non-compete laws are acutally quite reasonable if you look into them. First, they must be reasonable in the eyes of a Judge. While Im sure many people will object to such a subjective standard, it is what we have judges there to do. An agreement of not being able to work for another software developer ever is clearly unreasonable and would be laughed out of the courtroom. Something that says you cant work for a competitor for a 6 month period as a fear of unfairly damageing the company due to inside information would most likely be considered reasonable. It doesnt say that you cannot program, or make a living, but not with a competitor.
Even an agreement that says you cant program for someone else, period would be instantly thrown out of court. This is simply allowing companies some protection of their company's vital information leaking to competitors.
If the shoe was on the other foot, and a Google employee went to Microsoft and managed to get the jump on Google's X number of projects, Im sure there would be a lot of support for non-competition agreement.
But the last time I checked, DeCSS was a dubious procedure at best. With the DMCA, everytime you use DeCSS you are committing a federal felony by breaking a form of digital encryption. A handful of major Linux distributions have stopped supporting DVD playback in their "out of the box" distribution for this concern. Yes Linux will play it, but it will be illegal. Im sure the same can be said about a windows user who goes to similar lengths to play a movie through one of these new encryptions.
From the sounds of it, I think you have it correct. It would only make emails that contain porn, alcohol/tobacco adds, Illegal drug ads and the like.
Note, that is only in the Michigan law. I quick skim through the Utah one seems to lack that clause.
Too bad you were the only one who entered.
The problem here though, is that McDonalds has never made the impression to anyone that they sell steak. Its like asking Adobe for full documentation on Windows; they have no idea.
Wouldnt full specifications from McDonalds actually be them telling you exactly what is in each Quarter-Pounder with Cheese, and exactly what happens behind the scenes when they cook it?
I dont know about you, but I think those are some specifications that are better left unreleased.
Im would recommend another Wizards product, namely Betrayal at House on the Hill.
a yalhouse
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=ah/prod/betr
You can think of it as "The Un-Official Scooby-Doo" game. The premise is that the players are exploring a haunted house. About halfway through the game, one of the players is randomly determined to be the traitor who now usually becomes the adversary. I say usually because there are 40 different betrayal scenarios based on which items have been discovered, and where they were discovered. Each game runs about 45-60 mins, and because of the multiple scenarios, you can play this game all night.