That's not wholly correct, however. Libraries can indeed be held liable for patrons' copying of copyrighted works. This is called vicarious infringement, and can only occur if the library does not post a notice near reproduction equipment about copyright law applying to patrons' use of the equipment -- libraries get a special exception to Section 18.
Note that since the defendant is not a library, this exception does not apply to him.
Counting votes is not a serial process. It can be highly parallelized. The fact that you have 10 times as many people also means you have 10 times as many people to count them
Why not have one vote-counter per ballot cast, for the ultimate parallelization? Then counting the votes would be near-instantaneous. It would work something like this:
1. Enter the booth. 2. A random ballot from a previous voter pops up. You count the vote, and enter the result into a touchscreen separate from the touchscreen you use to cast your own ballot. 3. You cast your ballot via the 2nd touchscreen. Repeat 1-3 for all voters in district; have the district election supervisor count the last ballot. 5. A program then tabulates all the counted votes according to what the counters reported.
This would guarantee that every vote is counted by hand, and wouldn't take any time post-election to do the recount.
I think this would make everyone happy. Does anyone see any problems with this?
One, there is no way that a majority of Senators would want to be on record as voting against the bill. In order for it to be killed in the Senate, it would have to be killed in committee or poisoned. The Senate could pass a version completely untolerable (via a poison pill) to the House, which would effectively kill it for a while (or at least long enough to not affect the 2008 elections).
At any rate, it's a pretty safe bill to pass:
From the Bill Summary:
Exempts from this Act any election for which a recount under state law will commence before certification of the election results.
So any state can use non-paper-trail systems as long as they have a mandatory recount prior to certification. Most states require a recount for any sufficiently close election. So, this bill lacks teeth, big-time.
There has been a lot of other discussion about the pros and cons of this bill on legal and voting rights forums, and the consensus seems to be that the bill is a good first step, but has enough shortcomings to make it not a Good Thing. For one, a small reform of this sort will be enough to placate the vast majority of people who are slightly concerned about voting procedures, so that legislators can pat themselves on the back and go back to business as usual. For another, the vast majority of elections will not be subject to recount (3% of elections with less than 80% margin). We will still be relying on a secret, unverified count for greater than 97% of our electoral districts each election.
Once again Bush hides behind dead bodies to conceal his effort to destroy civil liberties.
Please don't lay this at the feet of Bush. He's a figurehead, and not the source of actions like this.
Six years from now, when people are thinking about the 2012 election, I hope that they don't think Bush was responsible for everything that has gone wrong recently. I fear that if so, we'll end up electing another head of the hydra.
If you see value in phone company monopolies (& universal service provision) then it makes no sense to also insist that they operate with both hands tied behind their back such that they are guaranteed to become obsolete and go out of business!
That's kind of a leap in deduction there. Verizon has an obligation to maintain equitable service for POTS; I have no problem with them investing in fiber -- as long as they fulfill their obligations first.
As for them being "guaranteed" to be obsolescent, I have no problem with that, either. There is no law granting Verizon the right to exist for all eternity, and if they can't both fulfill their obligations and adapt to the market, then that's their problem. But needing to change with the times is not an excuse for failing to provide the service they are required to provide by law -- as a baseline for operations.
Also, you shouldn't be a 21st century man. You should be a 21st century digital boy because it sounds so much better.
Or, as someone like me who grew up listening to Prog Rock like King Crimson, he could be a 21st Century Schizoid Man. Which is probably closest to the truth for a lot of us, and whose lyrics are oddly fitting considering his concern about the use of the word revolution...
As a Vonage subscriber and hating what Verizon is doing to them, I'm all for someone doing a goatse on Verizon.
Lots of things are obvious after they have been done for the first time.
So... by replying to the OP in this thread, you're saying that the first time someone did a goatse, it was obvious?!
I highly doubt it, as there is NO WAY anyone can conceivably argue that goatse is obvious. I mean, you can't really say we all would have thought of doing goatse, except that guy did it first.
Oh, wait. I see -- you just replied to the FP so your comment would be at the top of the comments section. NVM.
And in a way, who can blame them? They're a public company, they only have so much money to invest, and it's not maximally profitable to invest in rural areas.
They are legally required to offer service in all areas, hence USF surcharges on telephone bills. We pay for it, they are legally required to provide it...
The problem here isn't the monopoly status, it's the failure of Verizon to comply with the CC status that comes along with it -- hence the validity of the union's claim.
I believe that if Verizon is to have CC status for voice, then they must have it for internet -- thus making it apply to FIOS and DSL as much as POTS. This would require additional regulation of Verizon, so it'll never happen in today's political climate, but that's the only answer I see to Verizon's shiatty service to rural areas.
Verizon has been granted a monopoly on copper as long as they serve as a common carrier. If they are diverting funds from maintenance of their common carrier network to installation of selectively-installed FIOS, then they are violating common carrier rules.
The net effect here is that people in poor areas face degraded service while people in wealthy, high-density areas have enhanced service and options. This is exactly what common carrier status and state funding of telecomm was supposed to avoid.
Verizon should be forbidden from doing anything other than POTS (and DSL, provided they provide equal access to it, unlike the current situation). Let another company run fiber and operate a network over it, Verizon should not be allowed to run competing services when doing so violates their common carrier status.
Petty stock scams? Organized crime? Sure, I can see that as being 'wrong', though calling "organized crime" wrong is a tautology.
I, for one, do not believe peddling porn or hosting a gambling site are 'wrong'.
Sure, some porn is created in a manner that is harmful to the participants (such as taking advantage of drugged/underage/unwilling subjects). And some people cannot handle gambling -- and fixed games, or games where the players are misled as to their chances of winning, are wrong.
But to generalize that they are all bad? If they are, I don't want to be right.
If they make a car that will accept only Ford tires, the marketplace will shun it.
Unless, of course, the marketplace is doiminated by Ford. That's the whole gist of the problem.
It has nothing to do with public education, it has to do with the inability of a market to operate more-or-less freely, due to domination of one sector by one firm (Microsoft, in this case).
I understand what you're getting at -- defining what is peripheral (like the tires) and defining what is intrinsic to the product (like the glovebox). This is not so cloudy for computers as you make it seem -- operating systems do not need to include a web browser (MS's ridiculous assertions aside), and thus they are peripheral to the OS. They also do not need to include search capabilities -- MS could easily release their search agent as an accessory, instead of bundled.
At any rate, discussing what is extrinsic/intrinsic to a Ford automobile has *zero* relevance to what we are discussing, since Ford does not have a de facto monopoly on cars sold in the US, which means that the market's ability to opt for a competitor's product does not translate to the computer issue.
Although, the displacement of Native Americans from the east to parts further west like Oklahoma, Minnesota & Wisconsin (resulting in many deaths) isn't very widely known by most Americans.
I know that the "Trail of Tears" (the largest such forced migration) was reiterated countless times to us in school in the 70s/80s.
A lot of the history of conflict between Native Americans and European settlers is swept under the carpet now -- we, as Americans, don't like to admit that we waged a war of genocide. Sure, there were people who actually had respect for Native Americans, and the war was never couched that way, but when push came to shove, Native Americans were exterminated or driven from land that settlers wanted.
Now, as for Oregon Trail, I think it has to do with the changing attitudes about civil rights and respecting other cultures. People became much more aware of the fact that a lot of hatred is learned, and that there is no place for teaching hatred in our schools. Part of the whole anti-discrimination movement of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, I think.
There is an entire private structure dedicated to law enforcement in the U.S. (private prisons, arbitration, lawyers)
What? Even though some prisons are privately operated, they are still public institutions that incarcerate prisoners at the behest of the law of the land. Anyone who privately imprisons another is guilty of a crime. Arbitration? Are you kidding? Arbitrators in criminal and civil actions are public servants. Lawyers? The law is unclear and confusing in many cases, but the need for lawyers is there. Yes, there are a lot of lawyers who profit immensely off the legal system, but you make it out to be that the entire justice and legal system is a private organization out to make a buck.
I haven't even discussed their history of anti-trust, suspiciously monopolistic control
You mean their history of acting as a trust. Nice try, but anti-trust would mean that they don't act in a monopolistic or trust-like manner. Pick up a dictionary.
It's really very easy when you cast every issue in such black-and-white terms.
Sigh. Too bad this is not a black-and-white world. It's very easy to cast any issue in black-and-white terms in order to support a position. What's harder is to explain the nuances, and determine the best course of action based upon not-so-simplistic, and unrealistic, rationale.
No one would listen to me because I was a UNIX admin on a Windows team. Eventually I was let go and no one else took-up my cause (perhaps the cause was a large reason I was let go).
You seem a bit bitter.
About three months after I left some nasty work managed to find it's way into this "isolated" network and wreak much more havoc than we ever could have patching the damned servers.
Hmm. Let me get this straight, it "managed" to find its way onto the network about three months after you were let go? Sounds suspicious to me.
Note to self: Do not fire Nezer unless I'm sure everything is locked down tight.:)
If God (or someone else) did truly intelligently design life, that would mean all life forms are synthetic. Hence, prior art exists.
Did I just discover a scientifically *useful* application of ID wack-theory? If so, is the universe going to implode, or am I about to be flamed to fiery hell by people who never evolved a sarcasmeter?
I will have to waste my vote on a third party candidate.;-)
In the terms of the next pres election, it may be a wasted vote... but if it keeps that 3rd party on the ballot for subsequent elections, then it's not wasted at all. IIRC, most states mandate that any party with a >10% showing in a district will be automatically included on the next ballot... freeing up precious resources for campaigning for a candidate instead of campaigning to get on the ballot.
Incidentally, I am a registered Republican and I am incensed that Bush and Gonzales call themselves Republicans.
They are Republicans, and the Republican Party did elect them. Sorry, but that's the way it played out.
The reason I point this out is that by maintaining your allegiance to the Republican Party, you are condoning the actions of the politicians the party put forth. It's not that Bush Cheney et al have failed the Republican Party, it's that the GOP has failed its members. Don't think for a second that the Republican Party as an institution will have learned anything from the failures of their current figureheads, as the entire insititution[1] is broken by cronyism, powerlust, and greed.
Incidentally, situations like this are one of the prime reasons that the two-party electoral system is broken.
Now is a great time for a third party to convert moderate Republicans to its cause -- of course, this means a moderate party other than the Democrats would need to exist to do so.
[1] Note that this isn't a partisan hackjob on my part -- I believe the Democratic Party has the same problem.
Profit from Live is probably at least 30%. Microsoft makes a 30% profit from downloads. If someone is a Live subscriber and buys $50 worth of downloads a year (movies, television shows, Arcade, expansions, downloadable content), that would be $30 a year. Over 4 years, that's $120 profit. With publishers paying Microsoft $8 for every game sold, 20 games over 4 years adds up to $160. Both of those together would be about $280. If Microsoft's cost of manufacturing a 360 is about $300 http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multimedia/display/20 061120132150.html/ (the article is dated November 20, 2006 and I'm assuming that it's lower now) and their cost of shipping, assembling and store profit is about $100, their total cost per console would be $400.
...probably..if...if...
You should look at Live revenues/unit sold. Yes, your example sounds reasonable, but we have no idea if it's typical, which your model assumes.
Make Grand Theft Auto and Final Fantasy exclusive to the 360
Good luck making that stick with the remaining shareholders. MS's installed board would get their ass sued off by other shareholders if they tried that. Also, I'm not sure MS would want to waste the kind of cash it would take to buy enough outstanding shares of R*/Take2 to make it worthwhile. Something tells me it would be significantly higher than (or at least a significant chunk of) expected lifetime profits on the 360.
Many BASIC interpreters don't require line numbers and execute the lines of code in the order they appear.
Sorry, I didn't include a leading "..." to signify that there's something in the beginning; I assumed that was understood because of the line numbers; the "..." I did insert was to indicate that existing lines between my additions were not to be removed.
Also, sorry for forgetting that modern BASIC compilers don't need line numbers. I haven't really used BASIC in the past decade or so, I originally learned it on a PET 25+ years ago.
You can't get to PROFIT before you actually do the job you're supposed to be doing!
Haha! That's a good one. I don't know about you, but I know many people who made killer profits in the 90s without ever producing anything that their business plan siad they were supposed to produce. But, that's personal profit, not business profit.
Anyway, if you're profiting from printing "You are a good parent" then that condition is satisfied before the gosub executes... just a reminder, 10 comes before 15.
We still have all the freedom we need to change the government.
In theory. Not in practice.
Political alliances with corporations (especially including the media) inhibit our ability to change our government. We have the freedom, but not the ability -- which means, in actuality, we do not have the freedom. This is partly due to an incompetent electorate, as you point out, but it's also due to the ability of corporate/wealthy interests to game the system.
Yes, we could fix this by making the electorate more competent (who knows how?). But, it would also help to make sure that moneyed interests could not as easily manipulate the gullible electorate pure for gain. How? Simple -- purely public funding of elections.
People will always argue that campaign funding is a free speech issue. It is, but not because prohibiting it prohibits the speech of those who wish to donate money -- but rather because it prohibits the non-wealthy from having an equal value of speech. It disenfranchises the poor.
Anyway, I'm kind of rambling here, but I just wanted to point out that a freedom you have in theory, but not in practice, is not truly as freedom you have.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not wholly correct, however. Libraries can indeed be held liable for patrons' copying of copyrighted works. This is called vicarious infringement, and can only occur if the library does not post a notice near reproduction equipment about copyright law applying to patrons' use of the equipment -- libraries get a special exception to Section 18.
Note that since the defendant is not a library, this exception does not apply to him.
1. Enter the booth.
2. A random ballot from a previous voter pops up. You count the vote, and enter the result into a touchscreen separate from the touchscreen you use to cast your own ballot.
3. You cast your ballot via the 2nd touchscreen.
Repeat 1-3 for all voters in district; have the district election supervisor count the last ballot.
5. A program then tabulates all the counted votes according to what the counters reported.
This would guarantee that every vote is counted by hand, and wouldn't take any time post-election to do the recount.
I think this would make everyone happy. Does anyone see any problems with this?
One, there is no way that a majority of Senators would want to be on record as voting against the bill. In order for it to be killed in the Senate, it would have to be killed in committee or poisoned. The Senate could pass a version completely untolerable (via a poison pill) to the House, which would effectively kill it for a while (or at least long enough to not affect the 2008 elections).
At any rate, it's a pretty safe bill to pass: From the Bill Summary:So any state can use non-paper-trail systems as long as they have a mandatory recount prior to certification. Most states require a recount for any sufficiently close election. So, this bill lacks teeth, big-time.
There has been a lot of other discussion about the pros and cons of this bill on legal and voting rights forums, and the consensus seems to be that the bill is a good first step, but has enough shortcomings to make it not a Good Thing. For one, a small reform of this sort will be enough to placate the vast majority of people who are slightly concerned about voting procedures, so that legislators can pat themselves on the back and go back to business as usual. For another, the vast majority of elections will not be subject to recount (3% of elections with less than 80% margin). We will still be relying on a secret, unverified count for greater than 97% of our electoral districts each election.
Six years from now, when people are thinking about the 2012 election, I hope that they don't think Bush was responsible for everything that has gone wrong recently. I fear that if so, we'll end up electing another head of the hydra.
As for them being "guaranteed" to be obsolescent, I have no problem with that, either. There is no law granting Verizon the right to exist for all eternity, and if they can't both fulfill their obligations and adapt to the market, then that's their problem. But needing to change with the times is not an excuse for failing to provide the service they are required to provide by law -- as a baseline for operations.
I highly doubt it, as there is NO WAY anyone can conceivably argue that goatse is obvious. I mean, you can't really say we all would have thought of doing goatse, except that guy did it first.
Oh, wait. I see -- you just replied to the FP so your comment would be at the top of the comments section. NVM.
I own the patent to searching wherein the geographical search area is a star system, sucka. That wasn't a universe-wide search.
Besides, how can a geographical search area be universe-wide?
The problem here isn't the monopoly status, it's the failure of Verizon to comply with the CC status that comes along with it -- hence the validity of the union's claim.
I believe that if Verizon is to have CC status for voice, then they must have it for internet -- thus making it apply to FIOS and DSL as much as POTS. This would require additional regulation of Verizon, so it'll never happen in today's political climate, but that's the only answer I see to Verizon's shiatty service to rural areas.
Verizon has been granted a monopoly on copper as long as they serve as a common carrier. If they are diverting funds from maintenance of their common carrier network to installation of selectively-installed FIOS, then they are violating common carrier rules.
The net effect here is that people in poor areas face degraded service while people in wealthy, high-density areas have enhanced service and options. This is exactly what common carrier status and state funding of telecomm was supposed to avoid.
Verizon should be forbidden from doing anything other than POTS (and DSL, provided they provide equal access to it, unlike the current situation). Let another company run fiber and operate a network over it, Verizon should not be allowed to run competing services when doing so violates their common carrier status.
Petty stock scams? Organized crime? Sure, I can see that as being 'wrong', though calling "organized crime" wrong is a tautology.
I, for one, do not believe peddling porn or hosting a gambling site are 'wrong'.
Sure, some porn is created in a manner that is harmful to the participants (such as taking advantage of drugged/underage/unwilling subjects). And some people cannot handle gambling -- and fixed games, or games where the players are misled as to their chances of winning, are wrong.
But to generalize that they are all bad? If they are, I don't want to be right.
It has nothing to do with public education, it has to do with the inability of a market to operate more-or-less freely, due to domination of one sector by one firm (Microsoft, in this case).
I understand what you're getting at -- defining what is peripheral (like the tires) and defining what is intrinsic to the product (like the glovebox). This is not so cloudy for computers as you make it seem -- operating systems do not need to include a web browser (MS's ridiculous assertions aside), and thus they are peripheral to the OS. They also do not need to include search capabilities -- MS could easily release their search agent as an accessory, instead of bundled.
At any rate, discussing what is extrinsic/intrinsic to a Ford automobile has *zero* relevance to what we are discussing, since Ford does not have a de facto monopoly on cars sold in the US, which means that the market's ability to opt for a competitor's product does not translate to the computer issue.
A lot of the history of conflict between Native Americans and European settlers is swept under the carpet now -- we, as Americans, don't like to admit that we waged a war of genocide. Sure, there were people who actually had respect for Native Americans, and the war was never couched that way, but when push came to shove, Native Americans were exterminated or driven from land that settlers wanted.
Now, as for Oregon Trail, I think it has to do with the changing attitudes about civil rights and respecting other cultures. People became much more aware of the fact that a lot of hatred is learned, and that there is no place for teaching hatred in our schools. Part of the whole anti-discrimination movement of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, I think.
You mean their history of acting as a trust. Nice try, but anti-trust would mean that they don't act in a monopolistic or trust-like manner. Pick up a dictionary.
Sigh. Too bad this is not a black-and-white world. It's very easy to cast any issue in black-and-white terms in order to support a position. What's harder is to explain the nuances, and determine the best course of action based upon not-so-simplistic, and unrealistic, rationale.
Note to self: Do not fire Nezer unless I'm sure everything is locked down tight.
If God (or someone else) did truly intelligently design life, that would mean all life forms are synthetic. Hence, prior art exists.
Did I just discover a scientifically *useful* application of ID wack-theory? If so, is the universe going to implode, or am I about to be flamed to fiery hell by people who never evolved a sarcasmeter?
The reason I point this out is that by maintaining your allegiance to the Republican Party, you are condoning the actions of the politicians the party put forth. It's not that Bush Cheney et al have failed the Republican Party, it's that the GOP has failed its members. Don't think for a second that the Republican Party as an institution will have learned anything from the failures of their current figureheads, as the entire insititution[1] is broken by cronyism, powerlust, and greed.
Incidentally, situations like this are one of the prime reasons that the two-party electoral system is broken.
Now is a great time for a third party to convert moderate Republicans to its cause -- of course, this means a moderate party other than the Democrats would need to exist to do so.
[1] Note that this isn't a partisan hackjob on my part -- I believe the Democratic Party has the same problem.
You should look at Live revenues/unit sold. Yes, your example sounds reasonable, but we have no idea if it's typical, which your model assumes.
Good luck making that stick with the remaining shareholders. MS's installed board would get their ass sued off by other shareholders if they tried that. Also, I'm not sure MS would want to waste the kind of cash it would take to buy enough outstanding shares of R*/Take2 to make it worthwhile. Something tells me it would be significantly higher than (or at least a significant chunk of) expected lifetime profits on the 360.
Also, sorry for forgetting that modern BASIC compilers don't need line numbers. I haven't really used BASIC in the past decade or so, I originally learned it on a PET 25+ years ago.
Anyway, if you're profiting from printing "You are a good parent" then that condition is satisfied before the gosub executes... just a reminder, 10 comes before 15.
Whooooooosh.
Political alliances with corporations (especially including the media) inhibit our ability to change our government. We have the freedom, but not the ability -- which means, in actuality, we do not have the freedom. This is partly due to an incompetent electorate, as you point out, but it's also due to the ability of corporate/wealthy interests to game the system.
Yes, we could fix this by making the electorate more competent (who knows how?). But, it would also help to make sure that moneyed interests could not as easily manipulate the gullible electorate pure for gain. How? Simple -- purely public funding of elections.
People will always argue that campaign funding is a free speech issue. It is, but not because prohibiting it prohibits the speech of those who wish to donate money -- but rather because it prohibits the non-wealthy from having an equal value of speech. It disenfranchises the poor.
Anyway, I'm kind of rambling here, but I just wanted to point out that a freedom you have in theory, but not in practice, is not truly as freedom you have.