Fortunately, my current job does not use Notes. My previous job did. All I can say about Notes is that my previous job used it because it was simple enough for out technology challenged managers (we had a ton of them) to be able to use it. It wasn't very good and it took a surprisingly large support staff to run it, but the managers could do things with it and that ended up being why it was used.
cluedweasel says in the parent post:
"The judge was not enthused that they offered to settle for $7500 while noting that potential penalties could be as much as $150,000."
While technically accurate, it's extremely misleading. That makes it sound like the judge got angry that they were letting people off the hook for "only" $7500 when they could have asked for more. In fact, the judge's point was that a movie that could be legally purchased on Amazon as a disc ($9) or a rental ($3,.99) should not have a settlement offer of $7500. The $150,000 issue wasn't made by the judge and is in fact essentially irrelevant to the ruling. Once again the person who posts something interesting on Slashdot icnorrectly seizes on a relatively minor point as being the key issue of the post.
Mark my words: 25 years from now, Saudi Arabia as we know it will have gone down
I agree with you, but my fear is that what's going to replace it will be much much worse. The Arab Spring has shown that if given the choice, Muslims will choose to enslave themselves in repressive Islamo-fascist regimes. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the successor regime to the House of Saud ends up being Osama Bin Laden's dream government. Even Turkey has gone backwards. 10 years ago they had a legitimate shot at joining the EU and now the unspoken truth is that the EU will never let them in because they fear what they have already become and they fear that they could get even worse.
This isn't about "higher crop yields". This is about selling more Roundup.
It is in part, but not all. American food production has for several decades been driven by the unstated goal of "zero loss". This is why animals get fed antibiotics - so that the farmer ideally will not lose any before they can go to market. The idea behind using Roundup is to kill all non-food plants so that they don't outcompete food plants. I think US food production is based on unreasonable goals and I wish the government would ban the use of antibiotics in particular, but this is a problem that it seems that the free market cannot solve and the government has little interest in.
you do know there are many good reasons to not like obama other than his skin color right? The only people I hear talking about his skin color is those on the left trying to attribute it to those on the right. other than a few loons I dont see anyone on the right talking about obamas skin color. We are all more worried about his policies.
How often do you listen to the following people?
Glenn Beck
Rush Limbaugh
Sean Hannity
I hope your answer is somewhere in the neighborhood of "Not at all". Because if it's not, then you are blind to the problem.
Yes, outside of a few nut job average joes, nobody talks about Obama's color. But you'd have to be blind to miss the hints. "Did you know he's really a Muslim?" "He wasn't even born in the USA!" "All he wants to do is let Mexicans come here illegally and become citizens." "Obama wants to make you pay for healthcare for illegals." "Notice how he can't find a white male to nominate for the Supreme Court?" "Obama is a citizen of Kenya and has never been a US citizen." I mean if you do not detect the hidden, racial subtext between all of those comments, there's not much I can to help someone who is that blind.
I've always heard it explained that U.S. carriers lock the phones so that they can continue to charge still-paying-off-the-subsidy rates even after the 2-year contract has ended.
As an American, I can say the following. Those of you who don't live in the USA need to understand that everything is different here. Sometimes in good ways, but maybe most of the time in bad ways. Few Americans travel internationally so the demand for unlocked phones specifically to use them in other countries is quite low. For years, even after you finished a contract AT&T and other providers were rather infamous for refusing to unlock your phones. T-Mobile was an exception to this at the time as they had a policy to unlock your phone if you asked them to do so after your contract ended. Maybe it is different now and everybody unlocks when your contract is up. But perhaps 7-8 years ago, AT&T would tell you to suck it if you asked them unlock a phone after your contract ended with them. By keeping the phones locked, they were able to prevent people from moving to other carriers. Many people keep their phones for years after the original contract is done just to save money and by refusing to unlock them, those people found it cheaper to just stay with the carrier that locked them in than to get a new phone and possibly a new carrier. Also, those of you who don't live in the USA would not believe how much all the phone carriers bitched about being required by law to allow customers to move phone numbers to other carriers when their contracts ended. For years this was not possible, so some people also didn't ever change carriers just so they could keep the same phone number. So all this led to a situation where there was little demand for unlocking.
Yes, you have nailed it. It's not racism, it's Zero Tolerance. It provides a theoretical way for the schools to enforce discipline and standards on all the students by setting out a policy and making no exceptions to it. The only problem is that life doesn't work that way. For example, it's one thing to shoot your ex-spouse just because they made you angry and something else entirely for a policeman to shoot an armed robber at a bank who is holding hostages and threatening them. Zero Tolerance in those circumstances would require the policeman to be charged with a crime because he "killed someone". To me, this is just symptomatic of how American schools have failed and continue to fail. Zero Tolerance is the answer for everything. Just this week, a principal in (I think) Kansas City had to apologize because he refused to allow a student's solder brother to escort her to her prom because he was "too old" (he was 21). They had a rule that established a cutoff age for non-student escorts, and he was above that age. The only problem was this decision went viral and thousands of people gave the principal and the school district hell about this for "dishonoring an American hero" and the superintendent of the district made the principal apologize to the soldier and the policy will be changed to allow exceptions. But that's how America has decided to handle everything in the schools - These are our rules and they can't be changed. No exceptions. Oh your kids need to learn? Sorry, our business is enforcing the rules.
To summarize the court case, Naxos, a classical music label, was taking old 78 RPM vinyl records and using modern technology to clean up the surface noise and putting them out on a budget label they run. This was perfectly legal in the EU and Asia as the recordings in question were over 50 years old and not under copyright in those places. Unfortunately they got greedy in the USA and released a CD of Pablo Casals' famous recordings of the Bach Cello Suites from the 1930s. There was never any doubt that these recordings were still covered by US copyright law and I remain amazed to this day that Naxos somehow believed that they could get away with this reissue in the USA, but Capitol (the US copyright owner of the recordings) found out about the release in the US market and sued them and won. In my opinion the court decision was far overreaching, ruling that every sound recording ever made in the USA before 1972 was still under copyright protection through state law and would remain so until the superseding Federal law covering copyrights allows those copyrights to begin to expire, which will be 2067 at the earliest. The case is somewhat involved but basically after realizing they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar, Naxos resorted to some legal trickery in arguing that the Casals recordings (they were all made in London, England) were not covered by US state copyright law since they weren't made in the USA. The court didn't buy it and ruled that everything ever released or recorded in the USA is still under copyright and since Naxos had no real way to argue the case any further (they did indeed violate US copyright law), this crazy decision remains the US law on the matter.
Arrested Development is in the same boat as Firefly. It has hard core devoted fans, but there have never been enough of them. If it was really and truly as popular as its fans seem to think, it would still be on the air and it wouldn't be having to rely on Netflix to get available again. I watched the show a few times and it just didn't work for me at all. I really do not get what the big deal was. Let me put it another way - All you guys who posted about how Futurama sucks, so you're glad it's off the air - yeah, that's pretty much how I feel about Arrested Development. I will say that I really cannot think of any other show that Fox tried for so long to shove down its viewers throats despite plenty of evidence that most American TV viewers really did not care at about it and never were going to care about it no matter how long they kept it around and how many promos they ran for it.
I can't get real worked up about that. You sound like a guy I know at work. You did forget the obligatory quote from Jefferson or another founding father containing dire warnings about giving up liberty.
I've just heard too many people rant and rave for years about how the Constitution is being ignored, destroyed, etc. to get worked up about this. When George W. Bush was president, we heard that he was going to declare martial law and suspend the elections. Yet the man obeyed every Supreme Court decision that came down and when he stepped down, as required by law, the people who swore he never would give up power had no answer. Then the other side started to claim that Obama doesn't care about your rights, blah blah blah. Despite the hysterical ramblings we get here, the US legal system has remained independent as always. In fact, the only place that I've noticed where rights really and truly do seem to be disappearing is Western Europe, but nobody complains about that. You can still express distasteful thoughts in public in the USA and not be put in jail as long as you don't make threats against individuals, but Western Europe is at a place right now where you can get serious jail time for saying things that in no way invoke threats on anyone.
Don't assume that everyone else chooses a life partner as poorly as you. It's entirely possible to be married to a partner who (a) won't resent your hobbies ans (b) has his/her own too.
I can't say that my experiences are typical, but among people I know, I don't know any married people who are hardcore gamers. The only people I know who play games a lot are unmarried. Anyway, what are we talking about here? It's one thing to have a spouse who doesn't care if you play 1 or 2 hours a week (especially if you're not telling us that you play while that spouse is gone) and something else entirely to find the 1 in 1000 or fewer who don't care if you play 2-3 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Unfortunately your post is full of a lot of points in which you are horribly mistaken. First of all, you make the old Republican/Libertarian/US Military (yes them) argument that everything is better when done by the private sector. I agree that DHS isn't perfect, but I think it's illogical to assume that the US airline companies would do better. You are probably aware of how most if not all of the airlines have had baggage handlers caught red handed stealing stuff from passenger's checked luggage or running drug smuggling operations using the airlines as unwitting carriers. All it would take is one compromised low ranking employee in the right spot and suddenly there's a plane that blows up this time because a guy got compromised and let a terrorist sneak on a bomb. Yes, I do feel that having DHS run security makes this less likely. Arguing that it's not in the best interests of the airlines to have bad security hasn't stopped them from hiring dishonest luggage handlers and that's certainly not in their best interests either.
I'd argue that yes, the US does need military bases overseas to respond to threats. China grows more menacing every day with their patently absurd claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea. And just yesterday it was reported (bet you didn't hear it though) that China has advanced further than ever into Indian territory that they claim and have their soldiers camping under tents in Indian territory. India protested and the official Chinese response was something like "I don't know what you're talking about". Every year the US and Taiwan report that China puts more advanced weaponry directly aimed at Taiwan. You might ask yourself why they are so obsessive on putting a small island of under 24 million people under direct control, but it's because the CCP is obsessed with controlling every Chinese person there is. Did you know that ethnic Chinese people who are born in foreign countries and are not citizens of the PRC are under special rules should they ever wish to apply for visas to go to China? They have to fill out special forms that only apply to them. I know of no other nation that has such a requirement. There may be some redundancy in the bases in Europe, but they are also there to quickly respond to problems in Europe or the Middle East. It's pretty easy to just go "Sucks to be YOU" to every country in the world as China becomes increasingly aggressive and is now in the early stages of talking by force what they think is theirs, but at some point if you don't stand up to the bully (and yes, I get that to Chinese military eyes the US is the bully) it sets a bad precedent. And we're the only guy able to stand up to the bully. Taiwan just wants to be left alone. That's all they want. Yet all it has gotten them is a China that obsesses about taking them over at any cost, preferably sooner rather than later. You either stand with your friends or you don't and I guess you are one of those "don't" people. By the way, that kind of thinking got us into WWI and arguably into WWII as well.
The problem is Futurama is a lot better than other animated shows that Fox pays every year to bring back or start from scratch.
Does anybody in America actually think Bob's Burgers is good other than apparently Fox and the series creators?
Fox made a big deal out of Allen Gregory but I could tell from the trailer that it would be a big fail. What was it? A big fail.
Napoleon Dynamite was actually good and outdrew Bob's Burgers but Fox could not give up quickly enough on it and kept Bob's Burgers instead.
Just today I read The Cleveland Show described as a show so bad that its star isn't even missed on the show he left. The best I can say about it is that now it's merely so-so instead of being awful as it was when it started.
Every now and then I will watch a new episode of American Dad and it's never funny any more. Even Family Guy is hit or miss. Sometimes it's great. Sometimes it's not even a little bit funny.
It seems obvious to me exactly what is going to happen. If I'm wrong, well, good for all those who got into bitcoins.
Sometime within about 1 year from now, someone is going to hack bitcoin. Either
a) The goal will be simply to destroy it and render it worthless.
or
b) The hackers will make a lot of money before bitcoin in rendered worthless. Before anyone realizes what is going on and can stop the hackers, bitcoin will have been ruined.
The end result in both is that bitcoin will be rendered worthless. This attack or hack will be in a way that nobody saw coming, but after the fact everyone will slap themselves in the head and think "How did we not realize that this was possible?" I am not claiming to have any idea how this will all happen. I simply predict it will happen.
When this happens, people like me, Steve Forbes and others will say "Told you". The "true believers" (the anti-government nut jobs) will erroneously conclude that the entire idea was perfect and if they only fix the specific nature of the attack that destroyed bitcoin, then bitcoin2 will be able to start up and it will never, ever be compromised. Right.
You, sir, are either not a Libertarian or you represent the 1% of the party that is actually rational.
Here's what I hear all the time from Libertarians I have known.
ALL taxes are evil. Well, OK, maybe it's necessary to pay something just to support the military so China/Russia/whoever won't invade us.
There's NOTHING that the government does that private industry can't do better and cheaper. NOTHING.
Most of the taxes paid are wasted on a bloated government.
If government didn't do anything except run the military and maybe 1 or 2 other tasks, everybody would be richer and better off in this country.
I'm not going to comment on the fairness or lack thereof regarding your sister's situation. It's a long story, but I know more about immigration stuff than most Americans do. If I was a law school student, I would definitely go into immigration law. People who do that will never lack for business. I'd just like to list the following situations which I know first hand.
1) The brother of a friend of mine married a legal immigrant here on an H1B visa. The brother is a US citizen. His wife's visa was not going to be renewed and the US government was adamant that by God she was going back to her home country at the end of the employment to wait (up to a year) to get permission to immigrate back to the US as his wife. At the last minute another company was found to agree to sponsor her under a new H1B so she got to stay.
2) I worked with a guy who married a woman who came here from South America on a tourist visa and never left. She was here illegally for about 6 or 7 years when they married. As soon as they married, he went to an immigration lawyer and the guy got her status changed to legal status within days while they waited for her final and permanent status change to go through to be here as his wife. That went through within maybe a few months. You all see the disconnect, right? Someone here legally marries a US citizen and is told she has to leave because she was only here on a work visa, but someone who willingly disobeyed the law is allowed to stay simply because she's not here on a work visa but a travel visa.
3) I know a young woman in Singapore (that's not her nationality but it's where she works) whose entire family legally immigrated to the USA. For reasons she never explained, she chose not go immigrate but to watch over the family's property in their home country (her jobs sends her back and forth between there and Singapore). She cannot get a tourist visa to come to the USA to see her family because she is considered "a risk to stay". Her family is here legally, but she can't even come to visit them. I've read about cases where the parents of a legal immigrant applied for visitor's visa at the same US consulate but on different days and one parent was given the visa with no questions and the other was denied for being a "risk to overstay". US visa policy really makes no sense.
Well, I guess it worked out OK for him because he's been re-elected every election since then. This illustrates exactly what is wrong with the House of Representatives - at the House district level, voting is often about party affiliation only and nobody asks "Is this person deserving of my vote?" Voters just vote based on party affiliation. This does illustrate exactly why I abandoned the Republican Party a few years ago. I couldn't take the willful embrace of idiocy any more. Stupid people used to be Democratic voters, but somebody (Rove maybe?) realized around 2004 that the Republicans could tap into this "constituency" and make it their own. By 2008 the full on embrace of stupidity began by the Republican Party and I abandoned it, probably never to return.
This covers the same ground as a previously submitted question, but I seem to have some information that poster does not or at least failed to mention that might make this a (hopefully) better choice.
I read that you were working on a prequel to "Forbidden Planet" which really excited me because I think that the movie is still one of the all time great SciFi movies. I respect your work and I know that you would treat the subject with the respect it deserves. I read that you had a screenplay but it got leaked on the internet and after that the whole project seems to have just disappeared. Is there any realistic hope of ever seeing this project or did the leak kill it?
Reading the article helps. He was arrested for "downloading excessive material". In other words, he had a legal JSTOR account, he wasn't accessing it illegally, he just downloaded more material than they wanted him to. Really? That's a crime now?
Where were you when we went over this in all its gory detail? Yes, this is Slashdot and everything The Man does is evil, so I get the whole simplification thing. But the real situation was actually a bit complicated. He basically tried to download every article they had, which went beyond the terms of use of the service. His downloads impacted other users of the service at the time by slowing them down because - wait for it - he was trying to download everything and chewing up resources to do it. His plan was to make all these articles available for free when access to them required a paid service. He also hid the computer doing the work in a closet and took actions to hide his face from security cameras when going to the closet to check on his equipment. From a legal standpoint, this can be interpreted to mean he knew his actions were wrong. There's a lot wrong with how the prosecutors handled this, but he was hardly some innocent school boy who got bullied for no reason.
The case hinged on whether Alfred Anaya knew that the compartments were being used to smuggle drugs. In this context, when he was repairing one of the compartments in question he saw that it was full of bundles of cash. The prosecutors argued (and the jury agreed) that this was clear evidence that something illegal was going on, most likely drugs. He could have said no at that point, but he didn't. I'm generally in favor of legalization for most drugs, but this fellow isn't as sympathetic and innocent as the summary makes him out to be.
This. You get it. The problem with Slashdot is that the summaries tend to be simplistic and sensationalistic. I'm not a big fan of deliberately invoking Godwin's Law but I suppose if Slashdot had existed back in the days of WWII, the article about Hitler invading Poland would likely have a summary of "Reluctant German leader pushed to breaking point and forced to deploy troops in Poland". I think the punishment is insane, but the article says that he basically knew in at least one case that his compartments were being used by the illegal drug industry and he incorrectly assumed that by not asking questions he would have plausible deniability. The article makes it clear that Anaya greatly miscalculated what would happen in court and was caught off guard when people he did business with lied (or so Ayana claims) about his knowledge of their activities and the prosecutors were able to successfully paint him as a willing participant in the drug business who enjoyed the perks that came with the money he made.
The article should say that more than 1 billion dollars in bitcoins theoretically exists on the web. Given the horrific problems that a few bitcoin exchanges have had in the recent past, I think some skepticism is warranted. My prediction is that sometime in the upcoming years some kind of attack nobody foresaw will happen on bitcoins and the attackers will get wealthy and the bitcoin holders will be left holding dust or bitcoins will simply be another bubble that collapses. I don't see a bright future for bitcoins.
No, you are right. But there's a bigger, probably unsolvable issue that caused all this. By American standards (I'm American), Brazil has really weird property laws. In fact, I'd argue that a lot of Brazilian laws in general are weird based on my understanding of them. But specifically to this article, private property is really strange there. See, nobody owns those lands in the Amazon rain forest and the law prevents the government from owning them. Brazil also has some crazy laws that give squatters rights that I've just never heard of in any developed country. In the US, somebody owns all the land. It may be the US government, but somebody owns all American land. There is no American land that is not owned. If people just started clearcutting American national forests and putting cattle farms on them, they'd wind up in jail as soon as Uncle Sam found out about it. In Brazil, such things are just met with shrug from the government, a sigh and a "What can we do?" sort of response. The government doesn't own that land, so they are powerless to stop such things. Also, probably as an overreaction to abuses by dictatorial governments in the past, Brazilian law is really weak at punishing people. Someone could go to Brazil, kill a million people, go to jail for 29 years and then get out in time to do it all over again. Brazilian cops can legally shoot you down and kill you under circumstances that are completely illegal in the USA, but once you are in the system, you are safe. You can't get more than 29 years for any crime and Brazilian prisons are rather notorious for being run by the inmates. So the lack of effective punishment deterrents, a justice system that more often than not actually feels sorry for the perp rather than the victim (this is very common in countries that are strongly anti-death penalty), the lack of default government ownership of land and unusually strong squatter's rights laws have led to a situation where the only response is an indignant "We're not going to sell your meat" from the grocers. I suspect that the farms will continue to deplete the rainforest and they'll simply ship the meat to China.
You may have to wait a little longer, but people will start buying from Canada or other places without taxes.
I really doubt that. Based on what I see on other forums, most US consumers refuse to buy almost anything if they have to buy it online. I see people all the time who shlep down to their local brick and mortar store to pay more money, spend more time and get a worse quality product than something they could buy cheaper and of higher quality online. Ever been the grocery store or Wal-Mart and noticed how many people refuse to use the self-checkout line? I rest my case.
The right to keep and bear arms goes back to the founding days of this country. Our founding fathers realized that without an armed population, government is free to do as it wishes. Our founders needed their guns to declare their independence and self-rule. They also knew that maintaining that independence required an armed populace.
You are really naive. But cheer up. You have lots of company.
Trust me. If the US government wanted you dead, you have no defense at all against a Hellfire missle. Ever heard of Anwar al-Aulaqi? The idea that the US masses would rise and cohesively fight together and overturn the US military if it came down to it is just laughable.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately, my current job does not use Notes. My previous job did. All I can say about Notes is that my previous job used it because it was simple enough for out technology challenged managers (we had a ton of them) to be able to use it. It wasn't very good and it took a surprisingly large support staff to run it, but the managers could do things with it and that ended up being why it was used.
If India were actually behind this, why would it appear to come from India?
Because they're not really as good at IT as the people who use them as cheap labor realize.
cluedweasel says in the parent post:
"The judge was not enthused that they offered to settle for $7500 while noting that potential penalties could be as much as $150,000."
While technically accurate, it's extremely misleading. That makes it sound like the judge got angry that they were letting people off the hook for "only" $7500 when they could have asked for more. In fact, the judge's point was that a movie that could be legally purchased on Amazon as a disc ($9) or a rental ($3,.99) should not have a settlement offer of $7500. The $150,000 issue wasn't made by the judge and is in fact essentially irrelevant to the ruling. Once again the person who posts something interesting on Slashdot icnorrectly seizes on a relatively minor point as being the key issue of the post.
Mark my words: 25 years from now, Saudi Arabia as we know it will have gone down
I agree with you, but my fear is that what's going to replace it will be much much worse. The Arab Spring has shown that if given the choice, Muslims will choose to enslave themselves in repressive Islamo-fascist regimes. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the successor regime to the House of Saud ends up being Osama Bin Laden's dream government. Even Turkey has gone backwards. 10 years ago they had a legitimate shot at joining the EU and now the unspoken truth is that the EU will never let them in because they fear what they have already become and they fear that they could get even worse.
This isn't about "higher crop yields". This is about selling more Roundup.
It is in part, but not all. American food production has for several decades been driven by the unstated goal of "zero loss". This is why animals get fed antibiotics - so that the farmer ideally will not lose any before they can go to market. The idea behind using Roundup is to kill all non-food plants so that they don't outcompete food plants. I think US food production is based on unreasonable goals and I wish the government would ban the use of antibiotics in particular, but this is a problem that it seems that the free market cannot solve and the government has little interest in.
you do know there are many good reasons to not like obama other than his skin color right? The only people I hear talking about his skin color is those on the left trying to attribute it to those on the right. other than a few loons I dont see anyone on the right talking about obamas skin color. We are all more worried about his policies.
How often do you listen to the following people?
Glenn Beck
Rush Limbaugh
Sean Hannity
I hope your answer is somewhere in the neighborhood of "Not at all". Because if it's not, then you are blind to the problem.
Yes, outside of a few nut job average joes, nobody talks about Obama's color. But you'd have to be blind to miss the hints. "Did you know he's really a Muslim?" "He wasn't even born in the USA!" "All he wants to do is let Mexicans come here illegally and become citizens." "Obama wants to make you pay for healthcare for illegals." "Notice how he can't find a white male to nominate for the Supreme Court?" "Obama is a citizen of Kenya and has never been a US citizen." I mean if you do not detect the hidden, racial subtext between all of those comments, there's not much I can to help someone who is that blind.
I've always heard it explained that U.S. carriers lock the phones so that they can continue to charge still-paying-off-the-subsidy rates even after the 2-year contract has ended.
As an American, I can say the following. Those of you who don't live in the USA need to understand that everything is different here. Sometimes in good ways, but maybe most of the time in bad ways. Few Americans travel internationally so the demand for unlocked phones specifically to use them in other countries is quite low. For years, even after you finished a contract AT&T and other providers were rather infamous for refusing to unlock your phones. T-Mobile was an exception to this at the time as they had a policy to unlock your phone if you asked them to do so after your contract ended. Maybe it is different now and everybody unlocks when your contract is up. But perhaps 7-8 years ago, AT&T would tell you to suck it if you asked them unlock a phone after your contract ended with them. By keeping the phones locked, they were able to prevent people from moving to other carriers. Many people keep their phones for years after the original contract is done just to save money and by refusing to unlock them, those people found it cheaper to just stay with the carrier that locked them in than to get a new phone and possibly a new carrier. Also, those of you who don't live in the USA would not believe how much all the phone carriers bitched about being required by law to allow customers to move phone numbers to other carriers when their contracts ended. For years this was not possible, so some people also didn't ever change carriers just so they could keep the same phone number. So all this led to a situation where there was little demand for unlocking.
Yes, you have nailed it. It's not racism, it's Zero Tolerance. It provides a theoretical way for the schools to enforce discipline and standards on all the students by setting out a policy and making no exceptions to it. The only problem is that life doesn't work that way. For example, it's one thing to shoot your ex-spouse just because they made you angry and something else entirely for a policeman to shoot an armed robber at a bank who is holding hostages and threatening them. Zero Tolerance in those circumstances would require the policeman to be charged with a crime because he "killed someone". To me, this is just symptomatic of how American schools have failed and continue to fail. Zero Tolerance is the answer for everything. Just this week, a principal in (I think) Kansas City had to apologize because he refused to allow a student's solder brother to escort her to her prom because he was "too old" (he was 21). They had a rule that established a cutoff age for non-student escorts, and he was above that age. The only problem was this decision went viral and thousands of people gave the principal and the school district hell about this for "dishonoring an American hero" and the superintendent of the district made the principal apologize to the soldier and the policy will be changed to allow exceptions. But that's how America has decided to handle everything in the schools - These are our rules and they can't be changed. No exceptions. Oh your kids need to learn? Sorry, our business is enforcing the rules.
Did they secure the rights and pay the royalties on this recording? Someone call the RIAA. I smell a copyright lawsuit!
I know you are joking, but unfortunately according to the horrible decision in Capitol Records vs. Naxos of America, Inc. those Alexander Graham Bell records are technically still under copyright.
http://http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050412225604578
To summarize the court case, Naxos, a classical music label, was taking old 78 RPM vinyl records and using modern technology to clean up the surface noise and putting them out on a budget label they run. This was perfectly legal in the EU and Asia as the recordings in question were over 50 years old and not under copyright in those places. Unfortunately they got greedy in the USA and released a CD of Pablo Casals' famous recordings of the Bach Cello Suites from the 1930s. There was never any doubt that these recordings were still covered by US copyright law and I remain amazed to this day that Naxos somehow believed that they could get away with this reissue in the USA, but Capitol (the US copyright owner of the recordings) found out about the release in the US market and sued them and won. In my opinion the court decision was far overreaching, ruling that every sound recording ever made in the USA before 1972 was still under copyright protection through state law and would remain so until the superseding Federal law covering copyrights allows those copyrights to begin to expire, which will be 2067 at the earliest. The case is somewhat involved but basically after realizing they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar, Naxos resorted to some legal trickery in arguing that the Casals recordings (they were all made in London, England) were not covered by US state copyright law since they weren't made in the USA. The court didn't buy it and ruled that everything ever released or recorded in the USA is still under copyright and since Naxos had no real way to argue the case any further (they did indeed violate US copyright law), this crazy decision remains the US law on the matter.
Arrested Development is in the same boat as Firefly. It has hard core devoted fans, but there have never been enough of them. If it was really and truly as popular as its fans seem to think, it would still be on the air and it wouldn't be having to rely on Netflix to get available again. I watched the show a few times and it just didn't work for me at all. I really do not get what the big deal was. Let me put it another way - All you guys who posted about how Futurama sucks, so you're glad it's off the air - yeah, that's pretty much how I feel about Arrested Development. I will say that I really cannot think of any other show that Fox tried for so long to shove down its viewers throats despite plenty of evidence that most American TV viewers really did not care at about it and never were going to care about it no matter how long they kept it around and how many promos they ran for it.
I can't get real worked up about that. You sound like a guy I know at work. You did forget the obligatory quote from Jefferson or another founding father containing dire warnings about giving up liberty.
I've just heard too many people rant and rave for years about how the Constitution is being ignored, destroyed, etc. to get worked up about this. When George W. Bush was president, we heard that he was going to declare martial law and suspend the elections. Yet the man obeyed every Supreme Court decision that came down and when he stepped down, as required by law, the people who swore he never would give up power had no answer. Then the other side started to claim that Obama doesn't care about your rights, blah blah blah. Despite the hysterical ramblings we get here, the US legal system has remained independent as always. In fact, the only place that I've noticed where rights really and truly do seem to be disappearing is Western Europe, but nobody complains about that. You can still express distasteful thoughts in public in the USA and not be put in jail as long as you don't make threats against individuals, but Western Europe is at a place right now where you can get serious jail time for saying things that in no way invoke threats on anyone.
Never been married, have you?
Don't assume that everyone else chooses a life partner as poorly as you. It's entirely possible to be married to a partner who (a) won't resent your hobbies ans (b) has his/her own too.
I can't say that my experiences are typical, but among people I know, I don't know any married people who are hardcore gamers. The only people I know who play games a lot are unmarried. Anyway, what are we talking about here? It's one thing to have a spouse who doesn't care if you play 1 or 2 hours a week (especially if you're not telling us that you play while that spouse is gone) and something else entirely to find the 1 in 1000 or fewer who don't care if you play 2-3 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Unfortunately your post is full of a lot of points in which you are horribly mistaken. First of all, you make the old Republican/Libertarian/US Military (yes them) argument that everything is better when done by the private sector. I agree that DHS isn't perfect, but I think it's illogical to assume that the US airline companies would do better. You are probably aware of how most if not all of the airlines have had baggage handlers caught red handed stealing stuff from passenger's checked luggage or running drug smuggling operations using the airlines as unwitting carriers. All it would take is one compromised low ranking employee in the right spot and suddenly there's a plane that blows up this time because a guy got compromised and let a terrorist sneak on a bomb. Yes, I do feel that having DHS run security makes this less likely. Arguing that it's not in the best interests of the airlines to have bad security hasn't stopped them from hiring dishonest luggage handlers and that's certainly not in their best interests either.
I'd argue that yes, the US does need military bases overseas to respond to threats. China grows more menacing every day with their patently absurd claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea. And just yesterday it was reported (bet you didn't hear it though) that China has advanced further than ever into Indian territory that they claim and have their soldiers camping under tents in Indian territory. India protested and the official Chinese response was something like "I don't know what you're talking about". Every year the US and Taiwan report that China puts more advanced weaponry directly aimed at Taiwan. You might ask yourself why they are so obsessive on putting a small island of under 24 million people under direct control, but it's because the CCP is obsessed with controlling every Chinese person there is. Did you know that ethnic Chinese people who are born in foreign countries and are not citizens of the PRC are under special rules should they ever wish to apply for visas to go to China? They have to fill out special forms that only apply to them. I know of no other nation that has such a requirement. There may be some redundancy in the bases in Europe, but they are also there to quickly respond to problems in Europe or the Middle East. It's pretty easy to just go "Sucks to be YOU" to every country in the world as China becomes increasingly aggressive and is now in the early stages of talking by force what they think is theirs, but at some point if you don't stand up to the bully (and yes, I get that to Chinese military eyes the US is the bully) it sets a bad precedent. And we're the only guy able to stand up to the bully. Taiwan just wants to be left alone. That's all they want. Yet all it has gotten them is a China that obsesses about taking them over at any cost, preferably sooner rather than later. You either stand with your friends or you don't and I guess you are one of those "don't" people. By the way, that kind of thinking got us into WWI and arguably into WWII as well.
The problem is Futurama is a lot better than other animated shows that Fox pays every year to bring back or start from scratch.
Does anybody in America actually think Bob's Burgers is good other than apparently Fox and the series creators?
Fox made a big deal out of Allen Gregory but I could tell from the trailer that it would be a big fail. What was it? A big fail.
Napoleon Dynamite was actually good and outdrew Bob's Burgers but Fox could not give up quickly enough on it and kept Bob's Burgers instead.
Just today I read The Cleveland Show described as a show so bad that its star isn't even missed on the show he left. The best I can say about it is that now it's merely so-so instead of being awful as it was when it started.
Every now and then I will watch a new episode of American Dad and it's never funny any more. Even Family Guy is hit or miss. Sometimes it's great. Sometimes it's not even a little bit funny.
It seems obvious to me exactly what is going to happen. If I'm wrong, well, good for all those who got into bitcoins.
Sometime within about 1 year from now, someone is going to hack bitcoin. Either
a) The goal will be simply to destroy it and render it worthless.
or
b) The hackers will make a lot of money before bitcoin in rendered worthless. Before anyone realizes what is going on and can stop the hackers, bitcoin will have been ruined.
The end result in both is that bitcoin will be rendered worthless. This attack or hack will be in a way that nobody saw coming, but after the fact everyone will slap themselves in the head and think "How did we not realize that this was possible?" I am not claiming to have any idea how this will all happen. I simply predict it will happen.
When this happens, people like me, Steve Forbes and others will say "Told you". The "true believers" (the anti-government nut jobs) will erroneously conclude that the entire idea was perfect and if they only fix the specific nature of the attack that destroyed bitcoin, then bitcoin2 will be able to start up and it will never, ever be compromised. Right.
You, sir, are either not a Libertarian or you represent the 1% of the party that is actually rational.
Here's what I hear all the time from Libertarians I have known.
ALL taxes are evil. Well, OK, maybe it's necessary to pay something just to support the military so China/Russia/whoever won't invade us.
There's NOTHING that the government does that private industry can't do better and cheaper. NOTHING.
Most of the taxes paid are wasted on a bloated government.
If government didn't do anything except run the military and maybe 1 or 2 other tasks, everybody would be richer and better off in this country.
I'm not going to comment on the fairness or lack thereof regarding your sister's situation. It's a long story, but I know more about immigration stuff than most Americans do. If I was a law school student, I would definitely go into immigration law. People who do that will never lack for business. I'd just like to list the following situations which I know first hand.
1) The brother of a friend of mine married a legal immigrant here on an H1B visa. The brother is a US citizen. His wife's visa was not going to be renewed and the US government was adamant that by God she was going back to her home country at the end of the employment to wait (up to a year) to get permission to immigrate back to the US as his wife. At the last minute another company was found to agree to sponsor her under a new H1B so she got to stay.
2) I worked with a guy who married a woman who came here from South America on a tourist visa and never left. She was here illegally for about 6 or 7 years when they married. As soon as they married, he went to an immigration lawyer and the guy got her status changed to legal status within days while they waited for her final and permanent status change to go through to be here as his wife. That went through within maybe a few months. You all see the disconnect, right? Someone here legally marries a US citizen and is told she has to leave because she was only here on a work visa, but someone who willingly disobeyed the law is allowed to stay simply because she's not here on a work visa but a travel visa.
3) I know a young woman in Singapore (that's not her nationality but it's where she works) whose entire family legally immigrated to the USA. For reasons she never explained, she chose not go immigrate but to watch over the family's property in their home country (her jobs sends her back and forth between there and Singapore). She cannot get a tourist visa to come to the USA to see her family because she is considered "a risk to stay". Her family is here legally, but she can't even come to visit them. I've read about cases where the parents of a legal immigrant applied for visitor's visa at the same US consulate but on different days and one parent was given the visa with no questions and the other was denied for being a "risk to overstay". US visa policy really makes no sense.
banging his wardrum. this is the same asshole who thought iraq was trying to kill us all. how'd that turn out for ya mike? http://www.nbcnews.com/id/17707705/39591107
Well, I guess it worked out OK for him because he's been re-elected every election since then. This illustrates exactly what is wrong with the House of Representatives - at the House district level, voting is often about party affiliation only and nobody asks "Is this person deserving of my vote?" Voters just vote based on party affiliation. This does illustrate exactly why I abandoned the Republican Party a few years ago. I couldn't take the willful embrace of idiocy any more. Stupid people used to be Democratic voters, but somebody (Rove maybe?) realized around 2004 that the Republicans could tap into this "constituency" and make it their own. By 2008 the full on embrace of stupidity began by the Republican Party and I abandoned it, probably never to return.
This covers the same ground as a previously submitted question, but I seem to have some information that poster does not or at least failed to mention that might make this a (hopefully) better choice.
I read that you were working on a prequel to "Forbidden Planet" which really excited me because I think that the movie is still one of the all time great SciFi movies. I respect your work and I know that you would treat the subject with the respect it deserves. I read that you had a screenplay but it got leaked on the internet and after that the whole project seems to have just disappeared. Is there any realistic hope of ever seeing this project or did the leak kill it?
Reading the article helps. He was arrested for "downloading excessive material". In other words, he had a legal JSTOR account, he wasn't accessing it illegally, he just downloaded more material than they wanted him to. Really? That's a crime now?
Where were you when we went over this in all its gory detail? Yes, this is Slashdot and everything The Man does is evil, so I get the whole simplification thing. But the real situation was actually a bit complicated. He basically tried to download every article they had, which went beyond the terms of use of the service. His downloads impacted other users of the service at the time by slowing them down because - wait for it - he was trying to download everything and chewing up resources to do it. His plan was to make all these articles available for free when access to them required a paid service. He also hid the computer doing the work in a closet and took actions to hide his face from security cameras when going to the closet to check on his equipment. From a legal standpoint, this can be interpreted to mean he knew his actions were wrong. There's a lot wrong with how the prosecutors handled this, but he was hardly some innocent school boy who got bullied for no reason.
The case hinged on whether Alfred Anaya knew that the compartments were being used to smuggle drugs. In this context, when he was repairing one of the compartments in question he saw that it was full of bundles of cash. The prosecutors argued (and the jury agreed) that this was clear evidence that something illegal was going on, most likely drugs. He could have said no at that point, but he didn't. I'm generally in favor of legalization for most drugs, but this fellow isn't as sympathetic and innocent as the summary makes him out to be.
This. You get it. The problem with Slashdot is that the summaries tend to be simplistic and sensationalistic. I'm not a big fan of deliberately invoking Godwin's Law but I suppose if Slashdot had existed back in the days of WWII, the article about Hitler invading Poland would likely have a summary of "Reluctant German leader pushed to breaking point and forced to deploy troops in Poland". I think the punishment is insane, but the article says that he basically knew in at least one case that his compartments were being used by the illegal drug industry and he incorrectly assumed that by not asking questions he would have plausible deniability. The article makes it clear that Anaya greatly miscalculated what would happen in court and was caught off guard when people he did business with lied (or so Ayana claims) about his knowledge of their activities and the prosecutors were able to successfully paint him as a willing participant in the drug business who enjoyed the perks that came with the money he made.
The article should say that more than 1 billion dollars in bitcoins theoretically exists on the web. Given the horrific problems that a few bitcoin exchanges have had in the recent past, I think some skepticism is warranted. My prediction is that sometime in the upcoming years some kind of attack nobody foresaw will happen on bitcoins and the attackers will get wealthy and the bitcoin holders will be left holding dust or bitcoins will simply be another bubble that collapses. I don't see a bright future for bitcoins.
No, you are right. But there's a bigger, probably unsolvable issue that caused all this. By American standards (I'm American), Brazil has really weird property laws. In fact, I'd argue that a lot of Brazilian laws in general are weird based on my understanding of them. But specifically to this article, private property is really strange there. See, nobody owns those lands in the Amazon rain forest and the law prevents the government from owning them. Brazil also has some crazy laws that give squatters rights that I've just never heard of in any developed country. In the US, somebody owns all the land. It may be the US government, but somebody owns all American land. There is no American land that is not owned. If people just started clearcutting American national forests and putting cattle farms on them, they'd wind up in jail as soon as Uncle Sam found out about it. In Brazil, such things are just met with shrug from the government, a sigh and a "What can we do?" sort of response. The government doesn't own that land, so they are powerless to stop such things. Also, probably as an overreaction to abuses by dictatorial governments in the past, Brazilian law is really weak at punishing people. Someone could go to Brazil, kill a million people, go to jail for 29 years and then get out in time to do it all over again. Brazilian cops can legally shoot you down and kill you under circumstances that are completely illegal in the USA, but once you are in the system, you are safe. You can't get more than 29 years for any crime and Brazilian prisons are rather notorious for being run by the inmates. So the lack of effective punishment deterrents, a justice system that more often than not actually feels sorry for the perp rather than the victim (this is very common in countries that are strongly anti-death penalty), the lack of default government ownership of land and unusually strong squatter's rights laws have led to a situation where the only response is an indignant "We're not going to sell your meat" from the grocers. I suspect that the farms will continue to deplete the rainforest and they'll simply ship the meat to China.
You may have to wait a little longer, but people will start buying from Canada or other places without taxes.
I really doubt that. Based on what I see on other forums, most US consumers refuse to buy almost anything if they have to buy it online. I see people all the time who shlep down to their local brick and mortar store to pay more money, spend more time and get a worse quality product than something they could buy cheaper and of higher quality online. Ever been the grocery store or Wal-Mart and noticed how many people refuse to use the self-checkout line? I rest my case.
The right to keep and bear arms goes back to the founding days of this country. Our founding fathers realized that without an armed population, government is free to do as it wishes. Our founders needed their guns to declare their independence and self-rule. They also knew that maintaining that independence required an armed populace.
You are really naive. But cheer up. You have lots of company.
Trust me. If the US government wanted you dead, you have no defense at all against a Hellfire missle. Ever heard of Anwar al-Aulaqi? The idea that the US masses would rise and cohesively fight together and overturn the US military if it came down to it is just laughable.