what do you think are doctors supposed to tell their patients - "Hope you'll live until the patent expires"?
No, they generally say, where a patent applies, "hope you can pay for the patented treatment", because drugs that run out of patent protection often stop being made even if they are the best treatment for a disease, so outliving the patent often isn't helpful.
I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to get my hands on one of these. Why don't they make them available to the Western world at double the price, $200, and put the profits towards making more of them for the 3rd world?
Because a major reason for the low price is that they aren't doing the kind of packaging and marketing, etc., they'd need to do for individual sales, the cost would be significantly higher than $100 (or even the $150 that looks like it will be the "early adopter" cost) if it were sold to individuals, without any excess to put toward a subsidy.
That being said, OLPC is looking at making a somewhat more expensive and capable derivative system for sale to the public in the US and other advanced countries, but its a secondary priority.
This "mesh network" idea is pretty pie-in-the-sky for the technically barren regions the idea is being pushed on. Is someone going to establish transponders or regenerators, bridges, etc for Internet access?
The point of the mesh networking is to enable certain network applications without a persistent connection to the internet, but yes, a company has developed and will be making available a satellite earthstation designed especially for rural village and donating satellite time to provide internet access to accompany the OLPC project.
Does anyone even know if the schools are going to participate?
The purchasers of the laptops in the involved countries are the national ministries of education, who tend to be the people that run the schools. One might surmise, then, that the schools will participate.
Sometimes I think a bag of rice would be better spent on these areas than air dropping pastel, wind-up computers.
And, if you want, you are free to send a bag of rice to any region you think needs it. There are even many charities that you can contribute to that will take care of most of the logistics of providing food aid for you, so you just can give them money. OLPC will continue working with interested countries to develope and deliver educational tools that both the people behind OLPC and the countries to whom they are being sold, rather than air-dropped as unilateral gifts, believe will be useful to those countries educational systems. The two kinds of projects are not opposed to each other.
I've often wondered why punitive damages are given to the plaintiff, rather than, for example, funneled into law-enforcement programs (such as is presumably done with recovered drug money, etc.).
Punitive damages are held to serve a public social purpose by deterring, through the harsh example, deliberate wrongdoing—which is where punitive damages are available, generally— they are given to the plaintiff because doing so increases the incentive encourages the plaintiff to file suit where such deliberate wrongdoing occurs, and thus promotes the public purpose that such damages serve.
Maybe if he weren't to get them, we wouldn't have ridiculous trillion dollar (or even hundred million dollar) lawsuits.
Probably not by much; demonstrating the kind of willful conduct necessary to win punitive damages is hard, and punitive damages are limited by the actual damages awarded. Most really large damage awards that make the news are mostly or entirely actual compensatory damages, the few that are mostly punitive damages and are also very large are cases where there were both large actual damages proven and those large actual damages proven were shown to result from willful wrongdoing on the part of the defendant.
Go into a shopping mall and give a random person an OLPC -- what would they do with it?
Last I checked, the target market for the OLPC was not "random people in shopping malls".
Sure, it has some included apps, but that can't be sufficient to meet the needs of millions of kids with every need and in every environment imaginable.
Correct. Many things that children might conceivably want out of a computer will not be provided by the OLPC. It will not be a game platform to rival the PS3, for instance.
Its an educational tool being marketed to national ministries of education with a common application set being developed focussed on that market, optional accessories (like the satellite downlink system and donated satellite time) related to the role it is envisioned filling in providing a system for delivering educational content.
That it is also a general purpose computer for which other existing applications can be adapted and new applications developed is, of course, a bonus for its capacity to be adapted to different environments and to its ability to be supported and customized apps provided by the large institutional purchasers to whom it is being marketed (or third-parties), but its not being marketed as a general solution to all conceivable computing needs (which, at its price, shouldn't be a surprise), or even a general competitor to existing desktop and laptop commodity computers for mainstream use (which, again, given its price, shouldn't be surprising.)
Surely, it must be possible to build the same "Sugar" interface on any full install of a moder Linux OS... Where are the OS packages? Where is the SVN respository?
<blockquote>There is a difference between actual damages and statutory damages. Actual damages are an attempt to compensate the victim. Statutory damages are an attempt to include punitive damage in statute law. Whether or not this is wise law-making is debatable. I suspect that it would be better to force the victim to sue directly for punitive damages, thus leaving the matter to a judge to determine of the punishment fits the offense. </blockquote>
This is not quite correct.
Actual damages are damages proven in court, and are intended to compensate the victim. Punitive (also "Exemplary") damages are damages intended to "punish" or "make an example" of the victim (largely as a general and specific deterrent), beyond what compensates the victim. Statutory damages are amounts set in statute law in the absence of proven amounts of actual damages (or when the proven amounts are lower); in some cases they are largely compensatory in purpose, and included on the presumption that the kind of harms the statute seeks to provide a remedy for are prohibitively difficult to prove and quantify, and that substituting a default damage amount is a way to provide a reasonable remedy. In other instances, their intent is somewhat punitive in nature, though they are particularly ineffective in that regard as they tend to be superceded by actual damages rather than on top of actual damages.
<blockquote>Whether or not this is wise law-making is debatable. I suspect that it would be better to force the victim to sue directly for punitive damages, thus leaving the matter to a judge to determine of the punishment fits the offense. </blockquote>
Since the courts have held that punitive damages may only be awarded in a limited proportion to the actual damages proven, this would eliminate the principle role of statutory damages, which is to obviate the need to prove specific actual damages to receive some remedy for certain offenses.
Certainly, there is an argument that substantive due process analysis of the type that constrains <i>punitive</i> damage awards ought also be applied to statutory damage awards beyond what can be reasonably seen as compensatory, and/or that statutory damage amounts in law serving as a rebuttable presumption of actual damages rather than providing an amount that is available in all cases regardless of circumstances.
Your vague handwavey assertion that there might be something which modifies this is noted. However, if you are going to argue that there is something, rather than that there might be, you'd do better to cite it.
Yes, laws often have exceptions that change the meaning you would infer from reading one part in isolation. What you have not shown is that this new law at issue has such an exception that changes the meaning of the provision at issue here.
I swear it is like talking to a brick wall. Does nobody here understand what I am talking about? There are situations where you see that a crime obviously is taking place and you act. You don't call up a judge and sit on your ass in the meanwhile! If you see a letter and on the outside it says that this envelop is filled with anthrax should it just be delivered?
No.
Should it be placed in a box and not tested until a court order is given?
Yes.
Or maybe just maybe should it be opened by men in HAZMAT suits who test the contents of the envelope to find out if any of the workers at the Post office need to be on drugs to fend off the Anthrax.
Its extraordinarily unlikely that assembling the team of men in HAZMAT suits would take longer than getting the warrant. Its not as if warrants are only issued during regular business hours and require a process anything like a criminal trial, or even a hearing.
Of course, you might argue, this is a case where it would be better to just let the government act without this requirement, and perhaps it would. But that's not really the issue: the President isn't authorized to treat the law as he thinks it should be, whatever it is, particularly when he approves the change that takes away the authority he wants to assert. Constitutionally, searches without a warrant (even limited searches with something less than probable cause) may be reasonable and permitted. No one put a gun to Bush's head a forced him to sign a law making it so that first-class mail could not be searched without a warrant. If he disagreed with that provision, and certainly (though the objections I've seen raised so far in this thread to the restriction seem ill-considered, to me) one might reasonably do so, he should have vetoed the law rather than signing it and then asserting that he was going to pretend it didn't say what it clearly said, and instead continue to act is if prior law controlled when it came to searches of the mails.
In his signing statement, he refers to "exigent circumstances" and "specifically authorized by law", referring to foreign intelligence in the latter comment.
Except, that generally a newer statute generally supercedes an earlier one where they conflict, contrary to Bush's apparent desire to treat old law as controlling in the face of new law which would restrict the executive branch more.
No where does it say that the government will be going through peoples' mail, like the tone of the article suggests.
I disagree that the tone of the article suggests that at all, but at any rate given the Bush Administrations stated efforts at widespread monitoring to determine where there is specific cause to narrow in more closely when it comes to foreign intelligence, I'm not so sure that would be an unreasonable inference from the invocation of supposed foreign intelligence authority here.
If someone claims to have mailed a nasty toxic substance, or if there is probable cause to believe that something like that has occurred, then law enforcement/EMS better be there to take care of it.
Nothing in the law prevents law enforcement/EMS from being there to take care of it if probable cause exists to believe something like that has occurred. So that complaint is irrelevant as a defense of Bush's assertion of authority to selectively ignore this new law in favor of operating under rules that existed in its absence.
The post office doesn't have the resources to handle such tasks; let those who have experience with emergency situations handle it.
Nothing in the law requires the post office to handle such tasks in preference to other agencies. So that complaint also is irrelevant.
While mail should not be able to be searched just because somebody is under investigation or on a hunch without a court order; mail should be able to be searched with just cause.
If only we had some process, some system, which would allow law enforcement to establish that "just cause" existed to search mail or other private property, where a neutral magistrate could issue an order if such cause existed, or demand additional proof if it had not been established...
Everyone keeps talking about Bush like he is some evil, snickering sociopath, sitting in his dark cave-like office, cackling at his new diabolical plan to become ruler of the world. However, I see it very differently: Has anyone even considered that he is probably just genuinely terrified of the perceived terrorist threats, and that is why he is acting in a panicky, reactive manner and making stupid, irresponsible policies and decisions?
The two explanations are not incompatible. He could be a terrified, evil, snickering sociopath.
At any rate, the "evil, snickering sociopath" theory explains other actions (such as his mocking of Karla Fay Tucker as she was pendign execution) that are not explained by "genuinely terrified of the perceived terrorist threats" explanation, and is therefore a more powerful theory.
President Bush isn't claiming any new found Presidential power.
Yes, he is.
The entire article is extremely slanted and only down near the bottom is it revealed that Presidents have always had such power.
This is not at all true. Near the bottom, the article does not "reveal" that "Presidents have always had such power". It instead quotes a White House spokesman that doesn't even claim Presidents have always had such power, but instead that the Constitution does not forbid the government to engage in such searches. While this is certainly true, it is irrelevant: statute law can restrict the authority of the executive beyond the limits the Constitution places on the government. The Constitution places an outer limit on what the law may allow, but not everything that is within the scope permitted to the government by the Constitution is legal for the President, particularly when law is passed expressly forbidding the action at issue.
So that the Constitution permits warrantless searches in certain circumstances, and that those exceptions might apply to the mails as well, has no bearing here.
The fact is this: Bush is signing a law adding to the protection of first-class mail beyond what is obligatory under the 4th Amendment while claiming the right to ignore it in every case in which the provisions of the law aren't redundant with those of the 4th Amendment, directly in opposition to his oath and duty to faithfully execute the laws.
At the moment, no. But criticizing a product that the vendor attempts to sell as an upgrade because of a weakness it has in that role is not out of line merely because you are not forced to upgrade to it. Then again, in the post you responded to, I didn't say a darned thing about the product at all, merely the basis used to attack a criticism of it, which was completely nonspecific to the product or its features.
Is there anything wrong with still using Office 2k3, or XP?
One would think that criticism of the upgrade implied that there was, indeed, nothing wrong with continuing to use existing software in preference to the new thing that the vendor is trying to sell.
Can you really honestly tell me you want microsoft to restrain its interface design to the lowest common denominator just for the sake of familiarity?
No, what I want is, assuming someone wants to sell me a new product for a role I already have essentially filled with something that is workable if not ideal, provide adequate improvements in the functionality I care about to outweigh whatever costs (dollar, transitional familiarity, document conversion, etc.) it imposes.
Things that break familiarity are, in that analysis, a negative strike for unfamiliarity. If they provide a benefit that outweighs that, they may be worthwhile. To address the particular product at issue, though that's tangential to my earlier point, I've seen no reason to believe that, for me, MS's UI redesign provides such benefits.
The interface makes sense damnit!
So did the interface on WordStar for DOS, and most major office products from now to then (and before, for that matter.)
It's a logical work flow, it's task oriented, you dont really even have to think to find the tools you are looking for if you understand the premise of the interface.
I'm not as excited as you obviously are by the new UI's buzzword compliance, or the fact that if you've internalized its structure you don't need to think about it much (which is true of any UI.)
Just vote with your wallet, instead of making impotent wailings about it.
If your idea is that people should not discuss the positive or negative qualities of a product in a forum like Slashdot, but instead simply vote with their wallets by buying or not buying it, then its odd that you should make such impassioned arguments about the qualities of the new UI.
I see the same complaints every time the UI changes on any program that people use a lot: "They changed the UI and now I have to learn a different one!"
You might have a legitimate grievance if the new UI is worse than the old one, but complaining just because it's different is annoying and stupid.
No, I think you have it wrong. A change in UI always imposes additional transition costs. It is, therefore, a negative on the product. It may be enough better in the long run to justify that, and the vendors job is to convince the prospective consumer that that is the case. But complaining just because its different and therefore would impose additional hardship on the prospective purchaser who already has an established office suite is perfectly legitimate.
Lots of things in the constitution don't apply to people under the age of 18.
The only thing in the Constitution that applies only to people 18 and older is Amendment XXVI (though, as a practical matter, the other provisions relating directly and solely to voting rights also don't have much utility, as a direct consequence of that.)
Not quite lots.
For example, the right to privacy?
...is not in the Constitution, as such, but rather is an umbrella term for the effects of diverse Constitutional protections, all of which apply to minors.
Parents can snoop on and barge in on their kids as long as they want very legally.
"Parents" are not agents of the government, and the Constitutional provisions which protects elements of "privacy" restrict the government, not private actors. (That's also true of most of the rest of the Constitution, the Amendment XIII being a notable exception.)
Schools can restrict where kids can go
Granting that there are contexts in which this is true, what Constitutional provision do you think it illustrates is inapplicable?
and kids can't buy certain video games if they're not "approved".
While the government can place some restriction on access of minors to certain materials, this is not because Amendment I doesn't apply to minors, but because those restrictions are held to meet the standards the Court applies to restrictions of First Amendment rights, generally.
(Now, one could argue, particularly as applied to the federal government, that the Court's application of due process analysis to excuse intrusions into protected rights is a bad analytical approach that weakens the Constitution's protections, but it is well established.)
The problem, of course, is graft. I live in California which seems to have the worst roads in the nation.
I'm not sure that's true, but I'd agree that California seems to have a problem here: I expect that, as you note, inadequate "transparency and citizen oversight" plays a role, not because California is structurally worse, in outline, than other states in that regard but simply because that a state level bureaucracy like Caltrans is inherently more opaque and distant than a structurally identical organization would be in a smaller state.
As citizens we must demand transparency and oversight. Everything else is just jerking off because let's face it, there's no real difference between democrats and republicans. They're both populists.
There is certainly a difference between the beliefs, interests, and values of people who are committed Democrats and those who are committed Republicans, though there is certainly a continuum in between (and of to the sides, and...) But, of course, without effective transparency and oversight of what people in government are doing, the views of the people won't be reflected in what politicians do.
There's nothing wrong with private retailers deciding to do so on their own, or in response to market pressure.
When efforts are made to turn the ratings of an unaccountable private body into a legal control on who may purchase material, well, then there is a problem.
Until Aliens have the decency to walk up in broad daylight and say hello obviously they dont want to be seen. So leave them be, if they wanted to be discovered I dont' think it woudl be very difficult.
They clearly don't want to be discovered, I agree.
But then, if they had nothing to hide, why would they avoid discovery? Clearly, the fact that they are hard to discover proves that they are up to no good.
If by good you mean a huge failure that died a quick death, then yeah. It was good.
OS/2, as such, only stopped being marketed in 2005, IIRC, having been released in like 1988. I'm not sure that counts as a "quick death", even ignoring survival in the form of eComStation.
There's a fatal flaw in your otherwise well thought-out FUD - legislators, politicians, CEOs, etc tend to be middle-aged or older. As such, they tend to have families, and a lot of them have grandchildren.
They're not going to pass any law that prevents them from creating or being sent pictures or home videos of their children and grandchildren.
Lots of the politicians who passed Prohibition were drinkers, too, who wouldn't pass any law that prevents them from having, serving, and being provided with alcoholic beverages. Of course, then they were relying on selective enforcement, influence-peddling, etc. They'd never rely on things like that now, right?
This is kind of a hard sell seeing that Vista has Microsoft's might behind it, rather than against it.
So did OS/2, for the first several years it was available. The key difference is that, unlike OS/2 compared to DOS/Windows, Vista will be the OS Microsoft is promoting with bundling deals, rather than calling the "future" but only making available as an expensive upgrade.
What the entertainment industry lacks currently is light stuff like pulp fiction, be it books, movies, or tv shows
Uh, what?
Admittedly, the light stuff of today tends to come in slightly different style than the original pulps, but light, non-highbrow fictional works dominate all of the media you name. About the only place where this is somewhat less than glaringly obvious is TV, where a lot of the lighter overt fiction on the broadcast networks has been displaced with even lower-brow heavily-scripted and edited “reality” programming (OTOH, arguably, basic cable—particularly, for instance, the SciFi channel—makes up for much of the not-at-all-highbrow fiction deficit.)
I said "unjustly" in the sense that the PS3 listings that were being removed clearly met all of craigslist's rules.
Aside from the "Prohibited" category, which applies to violations of rules, the other ways in which things can be flagged on craigslist aren't supposed to be "rules violations", per se, as much as subjective judgments of appropriateness by users.
But scalping is a good thing in that it makes it possible for people willing to pay more (rather than spend ages line) able to get one without getting line. If there were no scalpers, people would just hire placeholders. I don't think that would make anyone feel any better.
Apparently, from your description, it would make many craiglist users, for one thing, feel better.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they generally say, where a patent applies, "hope you can pay for the patented treatment", because drugs that run out of patent protection often stop being made even if they are the best treatment for a disease, so outliving the patent often isn't helpful.
Because a major reason for the low price is that they aren't doing the kind of packaging and marketing, etc., they'd need to do for individual sales, the cost would be significantly higher than $100 (or even the $150 that looks like it will be the "early adopter" cost) if it were sold to individuals, without any excess to put toward a subsidy.
That being said, OLPC is looking at making a somewhat more expensive and capable derivative system for sale to the public in the US and other advanced countries, but its a secondary priority.
The point of the mesh networking is to enable certain network applications without a persistent connection to the internet, but yes, a company has developed and will be making available a satellite earthstation designed especially for rural village and donating satellite time to provide internet access to accompany the OLPC project.
The purchasers of the laptops in the involved countries are the national ministries of education, who tend to be the people that run the schools. One might surmise, then, that the schools will participate.
And, if you want, you are free to send a bag of rice to any region you think needs it. There are even many charities that you can contribute to that will take care of most of the logistics of providing food aid for you, so you just can give them money. OLPC will continue working with interested countries to develope and deliver educational tools that both the people behind OLPC and the countries to whom they are being sold, rather than air-dropped as unilateral gifts, believe will be useful to those countries educational systems. The two kinds of projects are not opposed to each other.
Punitive damages are held to serve a public social purpose by deterring, through the harsh example, deliberate wrongdoing—which is where punitive damages are available, generally— they are given to the plaintiff because doing so increases the incentive encourages the plaintiff to file suit where such deliberate wrongdoing occurs, and thus promotes the public purpose that such damages serve.
Probably not by much; demonstrating the kind of willful conduct necessary to win punitive damages is hard, and punitive damages are limited by the actual damages awarded. Most really large damage awards that make the news are mostly or entirely actual compensatory damages, the few that are mostly punitive damages and are also very large are cases where there were both large actual damages proven and those large actual damages proven were shown to result from willful wrongdoing on the part of the defendant.
Last I checked, the target market for the OLPC was not "random people in shopping malls".
Correct. Many things that children might conceivably want out of a computer will not be provided by the OLPC. It will not be a game platform to rival the PS3, for instance.
Its an educational tool being marketed to national ministries of education with a common application set being developed focussed on that market, optional accessories (like the satellite downlink system and donated satellite time) related to the role it is envisioned filling in providing a system for delivering educational content.
That it is also a general purpose computer for which other existing applications can be adapted and new applications developed is, of course, a bonus for its capacity to be adapted to different environments and to its ability to be supported and customized apps provided by the large institutional purchasers to whom it is being marketed (or third-parties), but its not being marketed as a general solution to all conceivable computing needs (which, at its price, shouldn't be a surprise), or even a general competitor to existing desktop and laptop commodity computers for mainstream use (which, again, given its price, shouldn't be surprising.)
Look at the OLPC wiki.
<blockquote>There is a difference between actual damages and statutory damages. Actual damages are an attempt to compensate the victim. Statutory damages are an attempt to include punitive damage in statute law.
Whether or not this is wise law-making is debatable. I suspect that it would be better to force the victim to sue directly for punitive damages, thus leaving the matter to a judge to determine of the punishment fits the offense.
</blockquote>
This is not quite correct.
Actual damages are damages proven in court, and are intended to compensate the victim.
Punitive (also "Exemplary") damages are damages intended to "punish" or "make an example" of the victim (largely as a general and specific deterrent), beyond what compensates the victim.
Statutory damages are amounts set in statute law in the absence of proven amounts of actual damages (or when the proven amounts are lower); in some cases they are largely compensatory in purpose, and included on the presumption that the kind of harms the statute seeks to provide a remedy for are prohibitively difficult to prove and quantify, and that substituting a default damage amount is a way to provide a reasonable remedy. In other instances, their intent is somewhat punitive in nature, though they are particularly ineffective in that regard as they tend to be superceded by actual damages rather than on top of actual damages.
<blockquote>Whether or not this is wise law-making is debatable. I suspect that it would be better to force the victim to sue directly for punitive damages, thus leaving the matter to a judge to determine of the punishment fits the offense.
</blockquote>
Since the courts have held that punitive damages may only be awarded in a limited proportion to the actual damages proven, this would eliminate the principle role of statutory damages, which is to obviate the need to prove specific actual damages to receive some remedy for certain offenses.
Certainly, there is an argument that substantive due process analysis of the type that constrains <i>punitive</i> damage awards ought also be applied to statutory damage awards beyond what can be reasonably seen as compensatory, and/or that statutory damage amounts in law serving as a rebuttable presumption of actual damages rather than providing an amount that is available in all cases regardless of circumstances.
The hard part of a 3.5" floppy is not a disk, the part that is a disk is not hard.
Your vague handwavey assertion that there might be something which modifies this is noted. However, if you are going to argue that there is something, rather than that there might be, you'd do better to cite it.
Yes, laws often have exceptions that change the meaning you would infer from reading one part in isolation. What you have not shown is that this new law at issue has such an exception that changes the meaning of the provision at issue here.
No.
Yes.
Its extraordinarily unlikely that assembling the team of men in HAZMAT suits would take longer than getting the warrant. Its not as if warrants are only issued during regular business hours and require a process anything like a criminal trial, or even a hearing.
Of course, you might argue, this is a case where it would be better to just let the government act without this requirement, and perhaps it would. But that's not really the issue: the President isn't authorized to treat the law as he thinks it should be, whatever it is, particularly when he approves the change that takes away the authority he wants to assert. Constitutionally, searches without a warrant (even limited searches with something less than probable cause) may be reasonable and permitted. No one put a gun to Bush's head a forced him to sign a law making it so that first-class mail could not be searched without a warrant. If he disagreed with that provision, and certainly (though the objections I've seen raised so far in this thread to the restriction seem ill-considered, to me) one might reasonably do so, he should have vetoed the law rather than signing it and then asserting that he was going to pretend it didn't say what it clearly said, and instead continue to act is if prior law controlled when it came to searches of the mails.
Except, that generally a newer statute generally supercedes an earlier one where they conflict, contrary to Bush's apparent desire to treat old law as controlling in the face of new law which would restrict the executive branch more.
I disagree that the tone of the article suggests that at all, but at any rate given the Bush Administrations stated efforts at widespread monitoring to determine where there is specific cause to narrow in more closely when it comes to foreign intelligence, I'm not so sure that would be an unreasonable inference from the invocation of supposed foreign intelligence authority here.
Nothing in the law prevents law enforcement/EMS from being there to take care of it if probable cause exists to believe something like that has occurred. So that complaint is irrelevant as a defense of Bush's assertion of authority to selectively ignore this new law in favor of operating under rules that existed in its absence.
Nothing in the law requires the post office to handle such tasks in preference to other agencies. So that complaint also is irrelevant.
If only we had some process, some system, which would allow law enforcement to establish that "just cause" existed to search mail or other private property, where a neutral magistrate could issue an order if such cause existed, or demand additional proof if it had not been established...
What to do, what to do...
The two explanations are not incompatible. He could be a terrified, evil, snickering sociopath.
At any rate, the "evil, snickering sociopath" theory explains other actions (such as his mocking of Karla Fay Tucker as she was pendign execution) that are not explained by "genuinely terrified of the perceived terrorist threats" explanation, and is therefore a more powerful theory.
Yes, he is.
This is not at all true. Near the bottom, the article does not "reveal" that "Presidents have always had such power". It instead quotes a White House spokesman that doesn't even claim Presidents have always had such power, but instead that the Constitution does not forbid the government to engage in such searches. While this is certainly true, it is irrelevant: statute law can restrict the authority of the executive beyond the limits the Constitution places on the government. The Constitution places an outer limit on what the law may allow, but not everything that is within the scope permitted to the government by the Constitution is legal for the President, particularly when law is passed expressly forbidding the action at issue.
So that the Constitution permits warrantless searches in certain circumstances, and that those exceptions might apply to the mails as well, has no bearing here.
The fact is this: Bush is signing a law adding to the protection of first-class mail beyond what is obligatory under the 4th Amendment while claiming the right to ignore it in every case in which the provisions of the law aren't redundant with those of the 4th Amendment, directly in opposition to his oath and duty to faithfully execute the laws.
At the moment, no. But criticizing a product that the vendor attempts to sell as an upgrade because of a weakness it has in that role is not out of line merely because you are not forced to upgrade to it. Then again, in the post you responded to, I didn't say a darned thing about the product at all, merely the basis used to attack a criticism of it, which was completely nonspecific to the product or its features.
One would think that criticism of the upgrade implied that there was, indeed, nothing wrong with continuing to use existing software in preference to the new thing that the vendor is trying to sell.
No, what I want is, assuming someone wants to sell me a new product for a role I already have essentially filled with something that is workable if not ideal, provide adequate improvements in the functionality I care about to outweigh whatever costs (dollar, transitional familiarity, document conversion, etc.) it imposes.
Things that break familiarity are, in that analysis, a negative strike for unfamiliarity. If they provide a benefit that outweighs that, they may be worthwhile. To address the particular product at issue, though that's tangential to my earlier point, I've seen no reason to believe that, for me, MS's UI redesign provides such benefits.
So did the interface on WordStar for DOS, and most major office products from now to then (and before, for that matter.)
I'm not as excited as you obviously are by the new UI's buzzword compliance, or the fact that if you've internalized its structure you don't need to think about it much (which is true of any UI.)
If your idea is that people should not discuss the positive or negative qualities of a product in a forum like Slashdot, but instead simply vote with their wallets by buying or not buying it, then its odd that you should make such impassioned arguments about the qualities of the new UI.
Have you considered practicing what you preach?
No, I think you have it wrong. A change in UI always imposes additional transition costs. It is, therefore, a negative on the product. It may be enough better in the long run to justify that, and the vendors job is to convince the prospective consumer that that is the case. But complaining just because its different and therefore would impose additional hardship on the prospective purchaser who already has an established office suite is perfectly legitimate.
The only thing in the Constitution that applies only to people 18 and older is Amendment XXVI (though, as a practical matter, the other provisions relating directly and solely to voting rights also don't have much utility, as a direct consequence of that.)
Not quite lots.
"Parents" are not agents of the government, and the Constitutional provisions which protects elements of "privacy" restrict the government, not private actors. (That's also true of most of the rest of the Constitution, the Amendment XIII being a notable exception.)
Granting that there are contexts in which this is true, what Constitutional provision do you think it illustrates is inapplicable?
While the government can place some restriction on access of minors to certain materials, this is not because Amendment I doesn't apply to minors, but because those restrictions are held to meet the standards the Court applies to restrictions of First Amendment rights, generally.
(Now, one could argue, particularly as applied to the federal government, that the Court's application of due process analysis to excuse intrusions into protected rights is a bad analytical approach that weakens the Constitution's protections, but it is well established.)
There's nothing wrong with private retailers deciding to do so on their own, or in response to market pressure.
When efforts are made to turn the ratings of an unaccountable private body into a legal control on who may purchase material, well, then there is a problem.
OS/2, as such, only stopped being marketed in 2005, IIRC, having been released in like 1988. I'm not sure that counts as a "quick death", even ignoring survival in the form of eComStation.
Lots of the politicians who passed Prohibition were drinkers, too, who wouldn't pass any law that prevents them from having, serving, and being provided with alcoholic beverages. Of course, then they were relying on selective enforcement, influence-peddling, etc. They'd never rely on things like that now, right?
So did OS/2, for the first several years it was available. The key difference is that, unlike OS/2 compared to DOS/Windows, Vista will be the OS Microsoft is promoting with bundling deals, rather than calling the "future" but only making available as an expensive upgrade.
Uh, what?
Admittedly, the light stuff of today tends to come in slightly different style than the original pulps, but light, non-highbrow fictional works dominate all of the media you name. About the only place where this is somewhat less than glaringly obvious is TV, where a lot of the lighter overt fiction on the broadcast networks has been displaced with even lower-brow heavily-scripted and edited “reality” programming (OTOH, arguably, basic cable—particularly, for instance, the SciFi channel—makes up for much of the not-at-all-highbrow fiction deficit.)
Aside from the "Prohibited" category, which applies to violations of rules, the other ways in which things can be flagged on craigslist aren't supposed to be "rules violations", per se, as much as subjective judgments of appropriateness by users.
Apparently, from your description, it would make many craiglist users, for one thing, feel better.