He probably *could* use Skype if he really needed to get in touch with people, but I could see scenarios where it would be more difficult, more expensive, or even flat-out impossible to contact family & friends using only Skype:
-- perhaps some of his family don't have phones, or a reliable internet connection; -- the time-difference between where he lives and where some of his family lives make it difficult or impossible for him to speak with them via Skype; -- The expense of SkypeOut credits could be a factor;
It's likely that he *could*, but Facebook might be the cheapest/easiest/most convenient method. I'm not all that sympathetic to his lawsuit, but I would say that it'd be nice of Facebook to at least provide him with a reason for why his account was suspended, to allow him to either clear up a misunderstanding, or at least be aware of what he did that they considered a bannable offense.
Yep - same basic principles as regenerative braking in a hybrid vehicle: friction from braking converts the energy of motion into stored electricity in a battery, which is then discharged when acceleration is needed. Given that there are also numerous pulleys and gears associated with this sort of a system, I'd imagine that it could also be used to directly power a generator hooked to a battery assembly as well.
Stats: Sansa: 2.2 x 1.4 x 0.6 inches; 0.8 ounce weight; 1" diagonal display; FM Tuner; iPod: 1.14 x 1.24 x 0.34 inches; 0.44 ounce weight; no display; no FM Tuner;
Both claim roughly the same 15 hour playback battery life.
Bottom line - If you want an FM tuner and a display, then the Sansa is definitely for you. If you prefer the smallest package possible, the shuffle wins. A five dollar difference is certainly significant, but probably not a deal-breaker if you have the $40 to drop on a portable music player to begin with. We're not talking a critical life support function here.
Going up their range, if you want bare-bones playback functionality, Sansa's offerings are definitely much cheaper, but they also don't have the touchscreen and app store features that Apple does when you get into the Nano & Touch models. Sansa appears to be focusing on a different market segment, which frankly appears to be a small part of the market. A few reports from mid-2010 reference an NPD paper that shows Apple with a 76% share of the MP3 player market, and mentions that Zune has less than 1% - this suggests that, at best, Sansa has 22% of the market (assuming that Microsoft, Apple, and Sansa were the only players in this space, which they are obviously not). More realistically, I'd guess Sansa has around 10%. Apparently enough to be lucrative, but they're not doing anything new or different in the way of design - their models look more or less like a classic iPod - and they lack the app store and touchscreen capability that's made the iPod Touches such a success.
Sansa appears to be focusing on the stripped-down lower-margin end of the market, which I suspect that Apple is more than happy to let them play in. The Zune, which is more of a feature-for-feature competitor, has captured Microsoft 1% of the market. Not exactly a competitive threat.
A contract, where one party only has to try their best efforts, with no real hard obligations, while the other must pay in cold, hard cash, on time, every month or else doesn't sound exactly fair to me.
It's perfectly fair - it's a contract, and it's what you agree to - except in the cases of government-granted-monopoly utilities (where rates are regulated by the government anyway), you are free to shop around for a rate and a plan that is the most suitable for you.
If you want to pay for minimum service level agreements including maximum allowable downtime, you need to be prepared to pay the costs for keeping line crews and repair techs ready to roll at a moment's notice. 24x7 uptime with repair crews on constant standby are a lot more expensive than "if it goes down, we'll repair it as soon as we can, but it may take a couple days for us to get there." And for utility companies who deliver over wide areas where their infrastructure is prone to storm damage & outages - blizzards, ice storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquake, what have you - you will also have to pay for the company to purchase insurance against claims filed as a result of that outage: "Last week's blizzard took down lines and left 200,000 households without service. We have to provide them with 200,000*X amount of free service / refunds / rebates as a result of failing to meet our 24x7 uptime guarantee."
If you've ever negotiated service level agreements for IT services, you know that the more 9's you tack on to the uptime requirements, the higher the cost is to maintain that level of service. 5-9's uptime (99.999% - ~5.5 minutes of downtime PER YEAR) is orders of magnitude more expensive than 90% uptime (36.5 days of downtime PER YEAR). Considering that most utility systems in built up areas are much more reliable the 90% uptime (absent massive natural disasters), you're probably getting a pretty good deal for the reliability of service you get.
In fairness, "friends and relatives all over the US" are a lot easier & cheaper to call with a typical US mobile plan than "friends and family all over the world". International calling charges can be quite steep if you (or they) don't (or can't) use something like Skype.
He had plenty of ways to contact them, but not all of them which are practical inside the US are practical when applied to a situation which involves international dialing fees.
Is that if you have a stable, point-to-point thing then, well, you want a train.
Or a pipeline. Or a road. Or a shipping lane. Or air cargo. Or a ropeway system. Or a train of pack mules. There are lots of ways to move cargo, there is no "one true way" to move it most efficiently. You choose the method that's most suitable for your needs.
Trains do work great for moving cargo. They also require significant environmental impact (clearing land, grading hilly terrain, carving tunnels), and your engines, track, and signalling systems require a fair amount of upkeep. For short- and mid-distance with relatively small / light loads, they often are not as efficient or as effective as other systems. Would you build a train line from each of your corn fields to a processing / distribution plant 5 miles away? A line that would be used a few times a day during harvest season, and then sit idle the rest of the year? Buy a locomotive & freight cars to move your corn 10 miles from field to processing a few times a year? What if those fields were in hilly, mountainous terrain where it was difficult to build & grade a road, and energy-intensive to move cargo?
You're an idiot, citing data from the early 1900's.
The *modern* system discussed, a ropeway conveyor system, which is an improvement over the traditional cargo ropeway: 1) Max speed - doesn't say, though this is less important than the carrying capacity; 2) Max distance - *lengths* of up to 10 km - presumably, these could be joined together over longer distances. 3) Max capacity: 10,000 tonnes per hour. 4) Market: Anywhere where moving up to 10,000 tonnes per hour from one point to another over a distance of up to 10 km is useful.
Here's an example, from the article, that doesn't draw on data that's 100 years old:
The most spectacular system, which has been tested in hurricane winds of 249 km/h, was built in 2007 for a Jamalco/Alcoa bauxite mine on Mt Olyphant in Jamaica (picture above). It is 3.4 kilometres long and has a vertical descent of 470 metres. The installation conveys some 1,200 tonnes of bauxite per hour from the mine to the processing plant, saving about 1,200 truck journeys per day and generating about 1,300 kWh of braking energy per day, which is fed back into the power network. The transport network thus doubles as a renewable energy plant.
They go on to cite several other manufacturing installations of similar scope and scale.
It's pretty clear that you didn't even attempt to read the article.
There are examples given of aerial lines in the 1800's and early 1900's stretching ~10 miles, 24.2 miles, 5.6 miles, 21.3 miles, 45 miles.
The article also goes on to say that these ropeways are cheaper than trains over hilly terrain, many use motors in the 2-15 hp range (vs. hundred or thousands of horsepower diesel locomotive engines), are easily reconfigurable to deliver their payload exactly where it's needed (reducing rehandling costs), and depending on the grade of the land they're traversing, may even be net-producers of energy due to the pull of gravity on the downhill stretches.
They're not going to replace long-haul trains or ocean-going cargo ships. But there probably are cases where these systems make sense and are more efficient and less costly, such as: 1) Short-distance transport where you have multiple production areas that need to transport their product to a central processing / transportation hub. (agriculture, mining, lumber, light manufacturing) 2) mid-distance transport where you have to shift cargo from one place to another. (transfer from a port city to inland shipping facility where containers are re-loaded for longer hauls inland - cheaper to build your shipping yards inland where land is cheaper, and where you don't have port city traffic to slow down your cargo trucks.) 3) Places where it's not economical to build a rail line, and air cargo is ridiculously inefficient (close-together, but hilly areas where rails would be expensive and air cargo would be a waste of fuel).
You should care, if you ever want to get "past the stupid HR drone and get an interview."
The degree requirement is used to narrow the pool, and lots of people who will be applying for a job in a corporate environment have a degree. If you get narrowed out of the pool before you can talk to someone, how does that help you?
There is a right to privacy in your financial records.
There is no right to not be subpoenaed. If your finances are relevant to your court case, then the court can issue a subpoena for those. Same applies to facebook.
If you post it on facebook, it may become public through the actions of another. If you post it on facebook, it may still be subpoenaed by a court even if it's so private that nobody on facebook has ever seen it. "Privacy" does not grant you some sort of immunity from prosecution and subpoenas.
Very little. If the court issues a subpoenas your records, they'll get access to your gmail just as fast as they'll get access to your facebook.
People seem to think that prosecutors have some sort of magic login to facebook allowing them to read any post. That's not the case. If they want the records, they ask a judge to issue a court order that the records be made available.
If you don't want a court to be able to subpoena the records, don't put them on facebook or gmail or any other online service.
How exactly should I go about proving to you that there is no contract and there is no law preventing this? Sort of hard to cite "the entirety of the law."
As the one making the assertion that visa/MC has violated some aspect of a contract or a law, the burden rests on you to cite the violations you believe they're guilty of.
If you have a visa card, it will be accepted "where visa cards are accepted.". Visa has no obligation to provide service "wherever you want it," and no merchant has an obligation to accept visa if they don't wish to.
If visa said, "person a can use their visa here, but person b may not," you might have a point. But thats not what they're doing. They are well within their rights to terminate their business arrangements with wikileaks. That may be unpopular, but it is not illegal, and suggesting it is - or should be - is a short step away from creating a state in which your rights are "whatever the government says they are today."
Without reading though my entire contract, I can't be sure, but I have a strong suspicion they have some obligation to provide me with financial services (as long as I am a customer, of course).
I think what you mean to say is, "I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, but I'll just throw out what I *think* should have happened and assume that it's an accurate legal opinion supported by numerous precedents." Visa can stop taking your money and stop providing you with services at any time they wish - when you sign up for a service, there's a terms of use document provided for you there, as well. It's not a contract, it's a set of rules which Visa requires you to agree to when you use their service. If you don't like them, don't agree with them, or plan to violate them, then perhaps you shouldn't do business with Visa.
What if tomorrow Visa said they would no longer process any transactions with Walmart?
Then you would need to use a different credit card for your shopping at Walmart, and if Walmart felt that Visa had violated some sort of a contract with Walmart, then it would be up to Walmart to file a claim against Visa. As a consumer, you could write a strongly worded letter to Walmart and Visa, and exhort them to work out their differences and offer Visa as a payment option, and shop elsewhere until they change their policies... and that's about the extent of it - you certainly couldn't barricade off every Walmart in the country to prevent people who do want to shop there from getting inside until they began accepting Visa again.
The customers of Walmart would have zero legal standing to file a claim against Visa for "failing to be accepted at Walmart." If wikileaks signed a contract with Amazon, then they can certainly pursue a claim against Amazon for breach of contract. Except, they DON'T have a 'contract' with Amazon, they have a 'terms of use' agreement they agreed to when they signed up for the service. They then proceeded to clearly violate the terms of use by uploading content for distribution that they do not own, and do not control. If there is no contract, there can be no violation of a contract.
Except you didn't bother to read the Terms of Use, where Amazon states the following:
You represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content, including any Third Party Software, that you post; that the content is accurate; that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity; and that you will indemnify AWS for all claims resulting from content you supply. AWS has the right but not the obligation to monitor and edit or remove any activity or content. AWS takes no responsibility and assumes no liability for any content posted by you or any third party.
Please tell me how Wikileaks "owns or otherwise controls all of the rights to the content, including any Third Party Software, that" they posted?
Government documents are not copyrighted as such - this does not mean that every document produced by the government is freely available with no restrictions. If Wikileaks doesn't own the documents, and the government has restricted access to the documents so that providing Wikileaks with the documents is a crime, then Amazon's conclusion that the posting of these documents by Wikileaks violates their Terms of Use is absolutely a direct logical consequence.
"people protesting" is not a "legal penalty" for refusing to provide services. I never suggested people don't have "the right to protest" - I said that Amazon had every legal right to refuse to provide service, and that doing so is not a breach of any contract.
Patronizing a business is not "signing a contract". There were no contractual obligations between Amazon and Wikileaks. There MAY have been contractual obligations between MC/Visa and the local Icelandic company that handled processing for them - and if there is, I'm sure a suit for breach of contract will help them recoup their losses and damages.
Let's also be very clear about this: Wikileaks violated at least the copyright clause of the Amazon Web Services Terms of Use. The leaked documents are not the property of Wikileaks, and they do not own the copyrights to those documents. They violated the terms of use in uploading and distributing them. As such, Amazon reserves the right to terminate service to people who violate their terms of use.
The MC/Visa issue is also not going to go far. This is politicians making a lot of noise to make some political points. It happens everywhere there's politicians. If a court rules that MC & Visa *must* do business with people they don't wish to, then you're opening up a hugely problematic precedent that will not stand for long because it will create consumer abuse nightmares. A broad "you can't refuse to provide services to anybody who demands it" ruling simply isn't sustainable.
No, because out of 9 pages detailing the relationship and story behind how they came to be working with Wikileaks, a couple sentences describing someone's first impression of Mr. Assange is clearly the most important. I can see why the submitter would zero in on that single paragraph, rather than the other content across the other 9 pages.
Actually, they might be arrested if they were standing on Barclay's property and refused to move. That's trespass. Barclay can't stop you from protesting on public property outside their office, but they certainly aren't obligated to provide you with a space in which to protest.
Much like they can't stop you for putting up a website that's (truthfully - libel would be a separate issue) critical of them and their business practices, but they don't have to provide you with a hosting server & bandwidth to do it on.
And if you actually blockade them so that NO business can get in or out, you will probably also run afoul of the law in the "real" world, too.
It is, in fact, quite typical to see businesses post a sign indicating that "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone."
They are not OBLIGATED to serve you. They are not OBLIGATED to provide you with a platform and distribution channel for your free speech. Business patronage is voluntary - would you be slamming Wikileaks if they had purchased service from Amazon, and then Wikileaks decided that some other service was better suited for their needs, and stopped paying for (and using) Amazon's services? After all, Amazon has a RIGHT to that income that they've come to expect... don't they?
Thanks for providing some other quotes from Ms. Palin. I'm sure you can find numerous silly statements, she gets a lot of press, and she's not exactly known for her deeply insightful commentary.
None of which change the fact, however, that she never said, "I can see Russia from my backyard." That comment was made by a comedian, Tina Fey, on a tv show, Saturday Night Live. It was a funny bit, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I also am able to distinguish between Ms. Fey's impressions of Ms. Palin, and the things Ms. Palin has actually said.
Ms. Palin's comments about Alaska's proximity to Russian soil are technically accurate, even if they don't address the point of the questions she's answering: some parts of Russia *are* quite close to some parts of Alaska. That fact doesn't do anything to suggest that she has some sort of foreign policy experience or expertise in diplomatic dealings with Russia, but her statement is an accurate representation of geography. This is something even the most green Slashdotter should know, as here on Slashdot, we value pedantic correctness above just about anything else.
The problem is, rather than address the very real shortcomings she has as a politician, people just smugly repeat this catchphrase that she never said. This distracts from any message which is critical of her in much the same way that attributing Dave Chappelle's "I'm Rick James, bitch!" catchphrase to Pres. Obama wouldn't add anything interesting, substantial, or factual to any debate about his qualifications or capabilities as a presidential candidate, or as the President.
It's not the only way possible to regain access to the account. If you are unable to identify photos for some reason, and are locked out of your account, you simply go through the standard (numerous) methods to identify your account to reset the password, or you can contact Facebook security and explain your situation.
None of these will result in "instant" access back into your account, but this is not the only way to regain access to an account that has been flagged as a security issue.
And let's be honest: does anybody here really think that, during the course of developing this feature, that NONE of the engineers at facebook could identify "Gee what if my friend doesn't post a picture of himself on his profile" as a potential problem with their solution, and design their solution to mitigate against that? Off the top of my head, fairly easy-to-code technical solutions: 1) Facial recognition software scans any photo being used for this captcha; if it doesn't appear to contain a single human face, or a clearly tagged *single* human face in a photo that shows multiple people... then don't use the photo. 2) Display multiple (Facebook has chosen three) photos of the person - one of them may be a cartoon. It's unlikely that ALL THREE will be. 3) If the user is, for any reason, unable to identify the person, allow the user to request different photos, or photos of another friend. 4) If the user is still unable to identify the user, provide them with links to a form allowing them to contact technical support directly.
I guarantee that several of these are already implemented. I further suspect that all of them are planned, if not fully implemented already.
"I can see Russia from my backyard." -- Palin (R) Alaska
You're either misattributing that quote, or you're intentionally lying about what she said in an attempt to discredit her - a task which, to be fair, she does adequately without requiring misquotes to do so. I'll be charitable and assume it's the former, and FTFY:
"I can see Russia from my backyard." -- Fey (Comedian), Saturday Night Live
GIBSON: What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?
PALIN: They're our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.
Ms. Palin's actual answer to his question was vague, uninspired, and showed no grasp of the issue he was quizzing her on, but if you're going to sling around quotes with your insults, at least get the fucking quote right.
Slashdot Mirror
He probably *could* use Skype if he really needed to get in touch with people, but I could see scenarios where it would be more difficult, more expensive, or even flat-out impossible to contact family & friends using only Skype:
-- perhaps some of his family don't have phones, or a reliable internet connection;
-- the time-difference between where he lives and where some of his family lives make it difficult or impossible for him to speak with them via Skype;
-- The expense of SkypeOut credits could be a factor;
It's likely that he *could*, but Facebook might be the cheapest/easiest/most convenient method. I'm not all that sympathetic to his lawsuit, but I would say that it'd be nice of Facebook to at least provide him with a reason for why his account was suspended, to allow him to either clear up a misunderstanding, or at least be aware of what he did that they considered a bannable offense.
Yep - same basic principles as regenerative braking in a hybrid vehicle: friction from braking converts the energy of motion into stored electricity in a battery, which is then discharged when acceleration is needed. Given that there are also numerous pulleys and gears associated with this sort of a system, I'd imagine that it could also be used to directly power a generator hooked to a battery assembly as well.
Hard to compare because there are no models which have feature parity - so you have to consider price and function tradeoffs.
iPod Shuffle: 2GB, walmart.com price: $44.99
Sansa Clip: 2GB, walmart.com price: $39.98
Stats:
Sansa: 2.2 x 1.4 x 0.6 inches; 0.8 ounce weight; 1" diagonal display; FM Tuner;
iPod: 1.14 x 1.24 x 0.34 inches; 0.44 ounce weight; no display; no FM Tuner;
Both claim roughly the same 15 hour playback battery life.
Bottom line - If you want an FM tuner and a display, then the Sansa is definitely for you. If you prefer the smallest package possible, the shuffle wins. A five dollar difference is certainly significant, but probably not a deal-breaker if you have the $40 to drop on a portable music player to begin with. We're not talking a critical life support function here.
Going up their range, if you want bare-bones playback functionality, Sansa's offerings are definitely much cheaper, but they also don't have the touchscreen and app store features that Apple does when you get into the Nano & Touch models. Sansa appears to be focusing on a different market segment, which frankly appears to be a small part of the market. A few reports from mid-2010 reference an NPD paper that shows Apple with a 76% share of the MP3 player market, and mentions that Zune has less than 1% - this suggests that, at best, Sansa has 22% of the market (assuming that Microsoft, Apple, and Sansa were the only players in this space, which they are obviously not). More realistically, I'd guess Sansa has around 10%. Apparently enough to be lucrative, but they're not doing anything new or different in the way of design - their models look more or less like a classic iPod - and they lack the app store and touchscreen capability that's made the iPod Touches such a success.
Sansa appears to be focusing on the stripped-down lower-margin end of the market, which I suspect that Apple is more than happy to let them play in. The Zune, which is more of a feature-for-feature competitor, has captured Microsoft 1% of the market. Not exactly a competitive threat.
I'm sure he'll be very distressed to learn that some ignorant AC on slashdot has decided he's spelling his own fucking name incorrectly.
Does this mean you won't accept his friend request?
I think the person giving free beers is more interested in personal services...
It's perfectly fair - it's a contract, and it's what you agree to - except in the cases of government-granted-monopoly utilities (where rates are regulated by the government anyway), you are free to shop around for a rate and a plan that is the most suitable for you.
If you want to pay for minimum service level agreements including maximum allowable downtime, you need to be prepared to pay the costs for keeping line crews and repair techs ready to roll at a moment's notice. 24x7 uptime with repair crews on constant standby are a lot more expensive than "if it goes down, we'll repair it as soon as we can, but it may take a couple days for us to get there." And for utility companies who deliver over wide areas where their infrastructure is prone to storm damage & outages - blizzards, ice storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquake, what have you - you will also have to pay for the company to purchase insurance against claims filed as a result of that outage: "Last week's blizzard took down lines and left 200,000 households without service. We have to provide them with 200,000*X amount of free service / refunds / rebates as a result of failing to meet our 24x7 uptime guarantee."
If you've ever negotiated service level agreements for IT services, you know that the more 9's you tack on to the uptime requirements, the higher the cost is to maintain that level of service. 5-9's uptime (99.999% - ~5.5 minutes of downtime PER YEAR) is orders of magnitude more expensive than 90% uptime (36.5 days of downtime PER YEAR). Considering that most utility systems in built up areas are much more reliable the 90% uptime (absent massive natural disasters), you're probably getting a pretty good deal for the reliability of service you get.
In fairness, "friends and relatives all over the US" are a lot easier & cheaper to call with a typical US mobile plan than "friends and family all over the world". International calling charges can be quite steep if you (or they) don't (or can't) use something like Skype.
He had plenty of ways to contact them, but not all of them which are practical inside the US are practical when applied to a situation which involves international dialing fees.
Or a pipeline. Or a road. Or a shipping lane. Or air cargo. Or a ropeway system. Or a train of pack mules. There are lots of ways to move cargo, there is no "one true way" to move it most efficiently. You choose the method that's most suitable for your needs.
Trains do work great for moving cargo. They also require significant environmental impact (clearing land, grading hilly terrain, carving tunnels), and your engines, track, and signalling systems require a fair amount of upkeep. For short- and mid-distance with relatively small / light loads, they often are not as efficient or as effective as other systems. Would you build a train line from each of your corn fields to a processing / distribution plant 5 miles away? A line that would be used a few times a day during harvest season, and then sit idle the rest of the year? Buy a locomotive & freight cars to move your corn 10 miles from field to processing a few times a year? What if those fields were in hilly, mountainous terrain where it was difficult to build & grade a road, and energy-intensive to move cargo?
You're an idiot, citing data from the early 1900's.
The *modern* system discussed, a ropeway conveyor system, which is an improvement over the traditional cargo ropeway:
1) Max speed - doesn't say, though this is less important than the carrying capacity;
2) Max distance - *lengths* of up to 10 km - presumably, these could be joined together over longer distances.
3) Max capacity: 10,000 tonnes per hour.
4) Market: Anywhere where moving up to 10,000 tonnes per hour from one point to another over a distance of up to 10 km is useful.
Here's an example, from the article, that doesn't draw on data that's 100 years old:
They go on to cite several other manufacturing installations of similar scope and scale.
It's pretty clear that you didn't even attempt to read the article.
There are examples given of aerial lines in the 1800's and early 1900's stretching ~10 miles, 24.2 miles, 5.6 miles, 21.3 miles, 45 miles.
The article also goes on to say that these ropeways are cheaper than trains over hilly terrain, many use motors in the 2-15 hp range (vs. hundred or thousands of horsepower diesel locomotive engines), are easily reconfigurable to deliver their payload exactly where it's needed (reducing rehandling costs), and depending on the grade of the land they're traversing, may even be net-producers of energy due to the pull of gravity on the downhill stretches.
They're not going to replace long-haul trains or ocean-going cargo ships. But there probably are cases where these systems make sense and are more efficient and less costly, such as:
1) Short-distance transport where you have multiple production areas that need to transport their product to a central processing / transportation hub. (agriculture, mining, lumber, light manufacturing)
2) mid-distance transport where you have to shift cargo from one place to another. (transfer from a port city to inland shipping facility where containers are re-loaded for longer hauls inland - cheaper to build your shipping yards inland where land is cheaper, and where you don't have port city traffic to slow down your cargo trucks.)
3) Places where it's not economical to build a rail line, and air cargo is ridiculously inefficient (close-together, but hilly areas where rails would be expensive and air cargo would be a waste of fuel).
You should care, if you ever want to get "past the stupid HR drone and get an interview."
The degree requirement is used to narrow the pool, and lots of people who will be applying for a job in a corporate environment have a degree. If you get narrowed out of the pool before you can talk to someone, how does that help you?
There is a right to privacy in your financial records.
There is no right to not be subpoenaed. If your finances are relevant to your court case, then the court can issue a subpoena for those. Same applies to facebook.
If you post it on facebook, it may become public through the actions of another. If you post it on facebook, it may still be subpoenaed by a court even if it's so private that nobody on facebook has ever seen it. "Privacy" does not grant you some sort of immunity from prosecution and subpoenas.
Very little. If the court issues a subpoenas your records, they'll get access to your gmail just as fast as they'll get access to your facebook.
People seem to think that prosecutors have some sort of magic login to facebook allowing them to read any post. That's not the case. If they want the records, they ask a judge to issue a court order that the records be made available.
If you don't want a court to be able to subpoena the records, don't put them on facebook or gmail or any other online service.
How exactly should I go about proving to you that there is no contract and there is no law preventing this? Sort of hard to cite "the entirety of the law."
As the one making the assertion that visa/MC has violated some aspect of a contract or a law, the burden rests on you to cite the violations you believe they're guilty of.
If you have a visa card, it will be accepted "where visa cards are accepted.". Visa has no obligation to provide service "wherever you want it," and no merchant has an obligation to accept visa if they don't wish to.
If visa said, "person a can use their visa here, but person b may not," you might have a point. But thats not what they're doing. They are well within their rights to terminate their business arrangements with wikileaks. That may be unpopular, but it is not illegal, and suggesting it is - or should be - is a short step away from creating a state in which your rights are "whatever the government says they are today."
Man, that's just super-insightful.
Care to cite an example of a country that *claims* to be a "progressive fundamental christian" state?
I think what you mean to say is, "I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, but I'll just throw out what I *think* should have happened and assume that it's an accurate legal opinion supported by numerous precedents." Visa can stop taking your money and stop providing you with services at any time they wish - when you sign up for a service, there's a terms of use document provided for you there, as well. It's not a contract, it's a set of rules which Visa requires you to agree to when you use their service. If you don't like them, don't agree with them, or plan to violate them, then perhaps you shouldn't do business with Visa.
Then you would need to use a different credit card for your shopping at Walmart, and if Walmart felt that Visa had violated some sort of a contract with Walmart, then it would be up to Walmart to file a claim against Visa. As a consumer, you could write a strongly worded letter to Walmart and Visa, and exhort them to work out their differences and offer Visa as a payment option, and shop elsewhere until they change their policies... and that's about the extent of it - you certainly couldn't barricade off every Walmart in the country to prevent people who do want to shop there from getting inside until they began accepting Visa again.
The customers of Walmart would have zero legal standing to file a claim against Visa for "failing to be accepted at Walmart." If wikileaks signed a contract with Amazon, then they can certainly pursue a claim against Amazon for breach of contract. Except, they DON'T have a 'contract' with Amazon, they have a 'terms of use' agreement they agreed to when they signed up for the service. They then proceeded to clearly violate the terms of use by uploading content for distribution that they do not own, and do not control. If there is no contract, there can be no violation of a contract.
Except you didn't bother to read the Terms of Use, where Amazon states the following:
Please tell me how Wikileaks "owns or otherwise controls all of the rights to the content, including any Third Party Software, that" they posted?
Government documents are not copyrighted as such - this does not mean that every document produced by the government is freely available with no restrictions. If Wikileaks doesn't own the documents, and the government has restricted access to the documents so that providing Wikileaks with the documents is a crime, then Amazon's conclusion that the posting of these documents by Wikileaks violates their Terms of Use is absolutely a direct logical consequence.
Yes, and what?
"people protesting" is not a "legal penalty" for refusing to provide services. I never suggested people don't have "the right to protest" - I said that Amazon had every legal right to refuse to provide service, and that doing so is not a breach of any contract.
Patronizing a business is not "signing a contract". There were no contractual obligations between Amazon and Wikileaks. There MAY have been contractual obligations between MC/Visa and the local Icelandic company that handled processing for them - and if there is, I'm sure a suit for breach of contract will help them recoup their losses and damages.
Let's also be very clear about this: Wikileaks violated at least the copyright clause of the Amazon Web Services Terms of Use. The leaked documents are not the property of Wikileaks, and they do not own the copyrights to those documents. They violated the terms of use in uploading and distributing them. As such, Amazon reserves the right to terminate service to people who violate their terms of use.
The MC/Visa issue is also not going to go far. This is politicians making a lot of noise to make some political points. It happens everywhere there's politicians. If a court rules that MC & Visa *must* do business with people they don't wish to, then you're opening up a hugely problematic precedent that will not stand for long because it will create consumer abuse nightmares. A broad "you can't refuse to provide services to anybody who demands it" ruling simply isn't sustainable.
No, because out of 9 pages detailing the relationship and story behind how they came to be working with Wikileaks, a couple sentences describing someone's first impression of Mr. Assange is clearly the most important. I can see why the submitter would zero in on that single paragraph, rather than the other content across the other 9 pages.
Actually, they might be arrested if they were standing on Barclay's property and refused to move. That's trespass. Barclay can't stop you from protesting on public property outside their office, but they certainly aren't obligated to provide you with a space in which to protest.
Much like they can't stop you for putting up a website that's (truthfully - libel would be a separate issue) critical of them and their business practices, but they don't have to provide you with a hosting server & bandwidth to do it on.
And if you actually blockade them so that NO business can get in or out, you will probably also run afoul of the law in the "real" world, too.
It is not illegal. It is not unlawful.
It is, in fact, quite typical to see businesses post a sign indicating that "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone."
They are not OBLIGATED to serve you. They are not OBLIGATED to provide you with a platform and distribution channel for your free speech. Business patronage is voluntary - would you be slamming Wikileaks if they had purchased service from Amazon, and then Wikileaks decided that some other service was better suited for their needs, and stopped paying for (and using) Amazon's services? After all, Amazon has a RIGHT to that income that they've come to expect... don't they?
Thanks for providing some other quotes from Ms. Palin. I'm sure you can find numerous silly statements, she gets a lot of press, and she's not exactly known for her deeply insightful commentary.
None of which change the fact, however, that she never said, "I can see Russia from my backyard." That comment was made by a comedian, Tina Fey, on a tv show, Saturday Night Live. It was a funny bit, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I also am able to distinguish between Ms. Fey's impressions of Ms. Palin, and the things Ms. Palin has actually said.
Ms. Palin's comments about Alaska's proximity to Russian soil are technically accurate, even if they don't address the point of the questions she's answering: some parts of Russia *are* quite close to some parts of Alaska. That fact doesn't do anything to suggest that she has some sort of foreign policy experience or expertise in diplomatic dealings with Russia, but her statement is an accurate representation of geography. This is something even the most green Slashdotter should know, as here on Slashdot, we value pedantic correctness above just about anything else.
The problem is, rather than address the very real shortcomings she has as a politician, people just smugly repeat this catchphrase that she never said. This distracts from any message which is critical of her in much the same way that attributing Dave Chappelle's "I'm Rick James, bitch!" catchphrase to Pres. Obama wouldn't add anything interesting, substantial, or factual to any debate about his qualifications or capabilities as a presidential candidate, or as the President.
It's not the only way possible to regain access to the account. If you are unable to identify photos for some reason, and are locked out of your account, you simply go through the standard (numerous) methods to identify your account to reset the password, or you can contact Facebook security and explain your situation.
None of these will result in "instant" access back into your account, but this is not the only way to regain access to an account that has been flagged as a security issue.
And let's be honest: does anybody here really think that, during the course of developing this feature, that NONE of the engineers at facebook could identify "Gee what if my friend doesn't post a picture of himself on his profile" as a potential problem with their solution, and design their solution to mitigate against that? Off the top of my head, fairly easy-to-code technical solutions:
1) Facial recognition software scans any photo being used for this captcha; if it doesn't appear to contain a single human face, or a clearly tagged *single* human face in a photo that shows multiple people... then don't use the photo.
2) Display multiple (Facebook has chosen three) photos of the person - one of them may be a cartoon. It's unlikely that ALL THREE will be.
3) If the user is, for any reason, unable to identify the person, allow the user to request different photos, or photos of another friend.
4) If the user is still unable to identify the user, provide them with links to a form allowing them to contact technical support directly.
I guarantee that several of these are already implemented. I further suspect that all of them are planned, if not fully implemented already.
You're either misattributing that quote, or you're intentionally lying about what she said in an attempt to discredit her - a task which, to be fair, she does adequately without requiring misquotes to do so. I'll be charitable and assume it's the former, and FTFY:
Now, if you're interested in what Ms. Palin actually had to say in her interview with Charlie Gibson, then that quote would read:
Ms. Palin's actual answer to his question was vague, uninspired, and showed no grasp of the issue he was quizzing her on, but if you're going to sling around quotes with your insults, at least get the fucking quote right.