The article explains (the summary doesn't) that it is illegal in the US to take a bet over a phone line. Doesn't matter that he was in costa rica, he had offices in the US that were handling phone calls for taking bets. If you don't like that law, get it changed; but don't just ignore it and then say it's extortion.
He had operations in the US (phone lines) so it wasn't a firm exclusively outside of the US. Also, nowhere in the summary or article does it state tax evasion. I agree that he probably wasn't rigging the sports, but insinuating that it's government extortion should be done with the facts; argue that you don't agree that having a phone line in the US doesn't make you have a presence. Argue that you think that bets should be allowed over a phone line. Don't argue about made up stuff, at best it distracts from the facts.
As per the summary (and article) the problem was that he used toll free phone lines to take the bets. That's illegal* and where he ran into problems. The casinos don't take bets over the phone. That's how it does not apply to the '"legal" gambling institutions'
* I'm not saying I agree with this law, just answering your question
DLC doesn't just happen. The dev team needs to stay on the project and work on it. If instead, that content was built into the game, then the game would have to ship later. So the choices are:
1) push the ship date out (that won't be popular)
2) put more content in, with less overall quality (that won't be popular)
3) put the time to develop the content, test it, certify it and give it away for free (that isn't going to happen)
4) Ship the game and make DLC available to those who want to purchase it.
I see choice 4 as being the reasonable and sane one. This isn't raping you, if you don't like it don't buy the DLC, if you really don't like it don't buy the game. If you think that the hand holding that a console gives you isn't worth the lock in, buy the PC version.
It would be pointless to test prior to integration of all submitted components.
I would think that continuously testing as components are submitted would be immensely valuable. Waiting for every component to be submitted only to find out that nothing works would be far less efficient that continuous testing of submissions that that problems are found (and fixed) early.
I used to sell Macs in '84. I once gave a demo to a group of guys that came in from CERN. I showed them Mac Paint and Mac Write, I copied and pasted between the two apps and they were fascinated. At one point someone asked about the price and I quoted the price in French Francs. Someone asked what that was in Swiss Francs, and one of them had a watch with a built in calculator so he spoke up and asked for the conversion rate. Meanwhile, I pulled down the apple menu and brought up the calculator and typed in the same numbers. I cut the converted price and posted it in the Mac Write document I was typing. The guy with the watch calculator was frozen staring at the Mac. So was the rest of the group. I found out after the demo that they were part of the UA1 team that had just won the nobel prize in physics. Just a simple calculator that could easily integrate with other apps left them completely speechless.
Today an application that doesn't support infinite undo is not worthy of a second look, but back then the notion of a GUI, with [limited] multi-tasking, was amazing even to guys who had access to most advanced technology.
That actually was produced in Microsoft, by Microsoft, for Microsoft. Their marketing group (or a subset) was using the humor/truth in it to show how they clutter their products and confuse the consumer.
Something to note, though the razor blade model is one way of doing things it is not the only way. For as much of a "failure" that the gamecube was, it made profits for Nintendo all along. Same with the Wii. Nintendo does not use the razor blade business model. Sony seems to use it at the beginning of the console's life cycle, but bring costs do so that they make a profit on each console sold by the end. this is why the PS3 has not seen a price drop, they are almost at break even and are not willing/able to hemorrhage money for market share.
I agree I could have phrased it better. Also, a bit of poking around led to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peacekeeping which states that the US and S. Korea took over the DMZ in 1967
I started to check on the various deployments over the years: Both gulf wars were "Coalition troops", not UN. US troops in Kosovo were under NATO.
Then I found an error on my part: the US troops in Somalia were part of a UN command. So, yes the US has donated troops, I was wrong.
That said, the vast majority of the UN troops are not US. Which the OP claimed. US troops in Lebanon were part of the Multinational Force. Vietnam was not a UN operation, rather is was a war.
So, going back to the OP comments about the US donating the building, the "defense budget" and the troops. Let me try my reply again.
Others have pointed out (not to the OP but in a thread above this one) that the US contribution is proportional to GDP. The EU as a block makes a similar contribution. Also note that a country does not contribute to the "defense budget" just like I don't pay the taxes that go into building the Interstate Highways (part of my taxes do, but I also pay for the military, medicare, etc).
With the rare exception, the US never contributes troops to UN operations. From the wiki link above, "About 4.5% of the troops and civilian police deployed in UN peacekeeping missions come from the European Union and less than one percent from the United States (USA)"
The US donated the troops in the 1950s to the UN for Korea. I think that you are correct that the US is still providing troops for that agreement. However, since then, any time the US has deployed troops it has been outside of the UN infrastructure.
This is research money. In my understanding of the term, that means that the money is to be spent to try and find solutions that don't exist today. They might succeed, they might fail. Even if they succeed, there's no guarantee that the research will make it into a commercial product. That is true of all research.
Furthermore, I don't see any comments that substantiate the vaporware tag. Shouldn't it be a requirement that if you're going to add a tag to an article you have to add a comment too?
If you are traveling at super sonic speeds they can't hear you coming. The Military solved their problem domain a long time ago, but not in a way that is useful to civilians; dead targets don't complain about the shattered windows as much as civilians do (I know, I know... but shooting the civilians means that you don't have an economy to build newer planes...)
But from the article "The companies also revealed that the upcoming display, which will become available for purchase sometime this summer, will cost much less than todayâ(TM)s high-end studio-quality LCD displays". That does tell me that this is not going to be stratospheric. Which means that I can hope that in some time in the next couple of years this should be in the realm of the affordable.
For the most part you are also allowed to take photos of government and (some military) locations. from http://www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf [read the whole paper for the details that I've ommited]
The General Rule
The general rule in the United States is that anyone may take photographs of whatever they want when they are in a public place or places where they have permission to take photographs. Absent a specific legal prohibition such as a statute or ordinance, you are legally entitled to take photographs.
Examples of places that are traditionally considered public are streets, sidewalks, and public parks. Property owners may legally prohibit photography on their premises but have no right to prohibit others from photographing their property from other locations. Whether you need permission from property owners to take photographs while on their premises depends on the circumstances. In most places, you may reasonably assume that taking photographs is allowed and that you do not need explicit permission. However, this is a judgment call and you should request permission when the circumstances suggest that the owner is likely to object. In any case, when a property owner tells you not to take photographs while on the premises, you are legally obligated to honor the request.
Some Exceptions to the Rule
There are some exceptions to the general rule. A significant one is that commanders of military installations can prohibit photographs of specific areas when they deem it necessary to protect national security. The U.S. Department of Energy can also prohibit photography of designated nuclear facilities although the publicly visible areas of nuclear facilities are usually not designated as such.
Members of the public have a very limited scope of privacy rights when they are in public places. Basically, anyone can be photographed without their consent except when they have secluded themselves in places where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy such as dressing rooms, restrooms, medical facilities, and inside their homes.
Permissible Subjects
Despite misconceptions to the contrary, the following subjects can almost always be photographed lawfully from public places:
accident and fire scenes
children
celebrities
bridges and other infrastructure
residential and commercial buildings
industrial facilities and public utilities
transportation facilities (e.g., airports)
Superfund sites
criminal activities
law enforcement officers
Here's a story, it is an example of how insider information was used to profit only those with the information. Sure, by leveraging the insider information it became public knowledge sooner than if it had not been used; however, it was not to the benefit of the market.
Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.
The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest, and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He further announced that he would now buy at $20.
This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.
Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!
The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him.
In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. "Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each."
The villagers rounded up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys. Then they never saw the man nor his assistant, only monkeys everywhere!
The free market also needs an educated consumer base. If the average consumer doesn't know that these antibiotics were used, nor the implication of their use, they'll just see that they're getting "better value" for their dollar and reward the farmers (ok, industrialists) who chose to use these antibiotics. The same goes for growth hormones, corn feeding, not dry aging, or anything else that the beef industry has done to maximize profits at the expense of quality.
Slashdot Mirror
The article explains (the summary doesn't) that it is illegal in the US to take a bet over a phone line. Doesn't matter that he was in costa rica, he had offices in the US that were handling phone calls for taking bets. If you don't like that law, get it changed; but don't just ignore it and then say it's extortion.
I agree about the unlock "dlc" - if it's on the disk then paying extra for it sucks. That only works for shareware titles.
He had operations in the US (phone lines) so it wasn't a firm exclusively outside of the US. Also, nowhere in the summary or article does it state tax evasion. I agree that he probably wasn't rigging the sports, but insinuating that it's government extortion should be done with the facts; argue that you don't agree that having a phone line in the US doesn't make you have a presence. Argue that you think that bets should be allowed over a phone line. Don't argue about made up stuff, at best it distracts from the facts.
As per the summary (and article) the problem was that he used toll free phone lines to take the bets. That's illegal* and where he ran into problems. The casinos don't take bets over the phone. That's how it does not apply to the '"legal" gambling institutions'
* I'm not saying I agree with this law, just answering your question
DLC doesn't just happen. The dev team needs to stay on the project and work on it. If instead, that content was built into the game, then the game would have to ship later. So the choices are:
1) push the ship date out (that won't be popular)
2) put more content in, with less overall quality (that won't be popular)
3) put the time to develop the content, test it, certify it and give it away for free (that isn't going to happen)
4) Ship the game and make DLC available to those who want to purchase it.
I see choice 4 as being the reasonable and sane one. This isn't raping you, if you don't like it don't buy the DLC, if you really don't like it don't buy the game. If you think that the hand holding that a console gives you isn't worth the lock in, buy the PC version.
Yeah, like we are going to RTFA the farking article.
That's pretty redundant
No, it's redundant redundant. Pretty redundant is when someone reposts a picture to usenet.
It would be pointless to test prior to integration of all submitted components.
I would think that continuously testing as components are submitted would be immensely valuable. Waiting for every component to be submitted only to find out that nothing works would be far less efficient that continuous testing of submissions that that problems are found (and fixed) early.
Good point, but wrong language. ForTran outdates Cobol. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_languages
I used to sell Macs in '84. I once gave a demo to a group of guys that came in from CERN. I showed them Mac Paint and Mac Write, I copied and pasted between the two apps and they were fascinated. At one point someone asked about the price and I quoted the price in French Francs. Someone asked what that was in Swiss Francs, and one of them had a watch with a built in calculator so he spoke up and asked for the conversion rate. Meanwhile, I pulled down the apple menu and brought up the calculator and typed in the same numbers. I cut the converted price and posted it in the Mac Write document I was typing. The guy with the watch calculator was frozen staring at the Mac. So was the rest of the group. I found out after the demo that they were part of the UA1 team that had just won the nobel prize in physics. Just a simple calculator that could easily integrate with other apps left them completely speechless. Today an application that doesn't support infinite undo is not worthy of a second look, but back then the notion of a GUI, with [limited] multi-tasking, was amazing even to guys who had access to most advanced technology.
This is personal, but I find it to be superior to OS X even in its current beta state.
Buddy, here's a hint... OSX has been out of beta for years, upgrade your mac to see what all the fuss is about
That actually was produced in Microsoft, by Microsoft, for Microsoft. Their marketing group (or a subset) was using the humor/truth in it to show how they clutter their products and confuse the consumer.
Something to note, though the razor blade model is one way of doing things it is not the only way. For as much of a "failure" that the gamecube was, it made profits for Nintendo all along. Same with the Wii. Nintendo does not use the razor blade business model. Sony seems to use it at the beginning of the console's life cycle, but bring costs do so that they make a profit on each console sold by the end. this is why the PS3 has not seen a price drop, they are almost at break even and are not willing/able to hemorrhage money for market share.
You're welcome, and thank you for keeping me honest and accurate.
I agree I could have phrased it better. Also, a bit of poking around led to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peacekeeping which states that the US and S. Korea took over the DMZ in 1967 I started to check on the various deployments over the years: Both gulf wars were "Coalition troops", not UN. US troops in Kosovo were under NATO. Then I found an error on my part: the US troops in Somalia were part of a UN command. So, yes the US has donated troops, I was wrong. That said, the vast majority of the UN troops are not US. Which the OP claimed. US troops in Lebanon were part of the Multinational Force. Vietnam was not a UN operation, rather is was a war.
So, going back to the OP comments about the US donating the building, the "defense budget" and the troops. Let me try my reply again.
Others have pointed out (not to the OP but in a thread above this one) that the US contribution is proportional to GDP. The EU as a block makes a similar contribution. Also note that a country does not contribute to the "defense budget" just like I don't pay the taxes that go into building the Interstate Highways (part of my taxes do, but I also pay for the military, medicare, etc).
With the rare exception, the US never contributes troops to UN operations. From the wiki link above, "About 4.5% of the troops and civilian police deployed in UN peacekeeping missions come from the European Union and less than one percent from the United States (USA)"
The US donated the troops in the 1950s to the UN for Korea. I think that you are correct that the US is still providing troops for that agreement. However, since then, any time the US has deployed troops it has been outside of the UN infrastructure.
Since the 1950's the US has never donated troops. The US troops deployed today are not UN trops.
This is research money. In my understanding of the term, that means that the money is to be spent to try and find solutions that don't exist today. They might succeed, they might fail. Even if they succeed, there's no guarantee that the research will make it into a commercial product. That is true of all research. Furthermore, I don't see any comments that substantiate the vaporware tag. Shouldn't it be a requirement that if you're going to add a tag to an article you have to add a comment too?
If you are traveling at super sonic speeds they can't hear you coming. The Military solved their problem domain a long time ago, but not in a way that is useful to civilians; dead targets don't complain about the shattered windows as much as civilians do (I know, I know... but shooting the civilians means that you don't have an economy to build newer planes...)
But from the article "The companies also revealed that the upcoming display, which will become available for purchase sometime this summer, will cost much less than todayâ(TM)s high-end studio-quality LCD displays". That does tell me that this is not going to be stratospheric. Which means that I can hope that in some time in the next couple of years this should be in the realm of the affordable.
For the most part you are also allowed to take photos of government and (some military) locations. from http://www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf [read the whole paper for the details that I've ommited]
The General Rule
The general rule in the United States is that anyone may take photographs of whatever they want when they are in a public place or places where they have permission to take photographs. Absent a specific legal prohibition such as a statute or ordinance, you are legally entitled to take photographs.
Examples of places that are traditionally considered public are streets, sidewalks, and public parks. Property owners may legally prohibit photography on their premises but have no right to prohibit others from photographing their property from other locations. Whether you need permission from property owners to take photographs while on their premises depends on the circumstances. In most places, you may reasonably assume that taking photographs is allowed and that you do not need explicit permission. However, this is a judgment call and you should request permission when the circumstances suggest that the owner is likely to object. In any case, when a property owner tells you not to take photographs while on the premises, you are legally obligated to honor the request.
Some Exceptions to the Rule
There are some exceptions to the general rule. A significant one is that commanders of military installations can prohibit photographs of specific areas when they deem it necessary to protect national security. The U.S. Department of Energy can also prohibit photography of designated nuclear facilities although the publicly visible areas of nuclear facilities are usually not designated as such. Members of the public have a very limited scope of privacy rights when they are in public places. Basically, anyone can be photographed without their consent except when they have secluded themselves in places where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy such as dressing rooms, restrooms, medical facilities, and inside their homes.
Permissible Subjects
Despite misconceptions to the contrary, the following subjects can almost always be photographed lawfully from public places:
accident and fire scenes
children
celebrities
bridges and other infrastructure
residential and commercial buildings
industrial facilities and public utilities
transportation facilities (e.g., airports)
Superfund sites
criminal activities
law enforcement officers
Here's a story, it is an example of how insider information was used to profit only those with the information. Sure, by leveraging the insider information it became public knowledge sooner than if it had not been used; however, it was not to the benefit of the market.
Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.
The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest, and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He further announced that he would now buy at $20.
This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.
Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!
The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him.
In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. "Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each."
The villagers rounded up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys. Then they never saw the man nor his assistant, only monkeys everywhere!
The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia
The free market also needs an educated consumer base. If the average consumer doesn't know that these antibiotics were used, nor the implication of their use, they'll just see that they're getting "better value" for their dollar and reward the farmers (ok, industrialists) who chose to use these antibiotics. The same goes for growth hormones, corn feeding, not dry aging, or anything else that the beef industry has done to maximize profits at the expense of quality.
It was Hitachi http://www.itjungle.com/mid/mid022702-story06.html