>>>Tell that to the fucking cameras that always get me a ticket for making a LEGAL RIGHT HAND TURN AT A RED LIGHT.

I don't believe this story.

Most cameras (or their operators) are intelligent enough to know the difference between an illegal move and a legal right turn. And even if were true, by this point you could sue the city for harassment, because you keep getting ticketed for doing nothing wrong. The AAA won a similar case in Washington D.C. (the lights were too short). The cameras are still there but the problem fixed.

Prior art for most of these kinds of patents is obvious to anyone in the industry. If it's that obvious, there's no way reporting it will do any good: The fix is in.

Plus, most of us have better things to do than piss off corporations with lots of lawyers and an obvious willingness to use them.

That's pretty much how VoIP works.

Fair enough. As of 2008's CIA estimate, China has 1,330,044,544 people and Iran has 65,875,224, making the execution rates 1.29 per million in China and 5.25 per million in Iran.

For fun, I ran the numbers on the next three highest (and consistantly highest) capital states. Saudi Arabia, with 27,601,038 people and 102 executions, has 3.70 per million. The USA, with 304,059,724 people and 37 executions, has 0.12. Pakistan, with 172,800,048 people and 36 executions, has 0.21.

China is actually a lot more restrained than Iran.

Not in terms of executions.

In 2008, China is purported to have performed 1,718 out of the 2,390 reported executions in the entire world. 72% is a pretty significant chunk. Iran's #2 with 346 (14%). Then again, China has not been reported to still be executing minors; Iran still does. (Source: Amnesty International)

Just because they would almost certainly win in court doesn't mean that Flickr wants to spend money to defend it in court. This is especially true, since even if the guy had a "pro" account, which he doesn't, he'd only be worth $25 a year to Flickr.

So we can only call a crime violent if the victim is willing to resist in same[sic] manner?

Uh, yes. At least in the US; I don't have enough knowledge about other jurisdictions to comment on them.

If the victim makes absolutely no effort to resist, to include verbal refusal, then forcible rape cannot be proven. If I had any of my law books in my backpack, I'd cite them, but the bottom line here is that in order to charge someone with forcible rape, the victim has to offer some kind of resistance.

"He was big and scary, so I had sex with him, even though I didn't want to," is not a valid argument for forcible rape.
"I told him no, but he did it anyways," is.
"I tried to stop him, pushed him away, and told him no, but he did it anyways," is even better.

In the first case, the victim was coerced into having consensual sex. The offender could be charged with coercion, but charging forcible rape is going to be basically impossible. Again, for forcible rape to happen, the victim needs to resist in some manner. Absence of clear willingness is generally not enough to charge forcible rape, though may be enough to charge statutory rape, especially in cases of mental incompetence, incapacitation, being juvenile and unconsciousness.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I have very recently aced two Criminal Law classes.

and hilarity ensued!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOZuLD1u_K4

They're not really hyper ambulatory. 7kph is walking speed for most humans. ASIMO is filling the predatory niche of the North American zombie.

Dude, the word dude has steadily lost its gender meaning. Anyone getting offended because they were referred to on the internet as a "dude" should grow up.

I rather hate their stuff as well. Their Java applets tend to crash a few times a week for me. I'm glad when they do, because everything loads considerably faster afterwards. It seems like whatever they have as their failsafe system works far better than their Java implimentation.

Creating a human-sounding voice is not the problem; it's creating a computer model to convincingly replicate an emotional human-sounding voice that shifts intonation and stress to match the appropriate feel of a line. It's not impossible, but until AI is developed, we can't automate it. The best we could do is reduce it to a series of variables and create a whole new field of sound engineering.

I actually like the idea of someone getting paid to tweak artificially generated voices and "act" the lines mathematically, but you wouldn't be saving any money over just hiring a voice actor.

There's a bit of a difference in scale here. How do you get on with your life after paying a two million dollar fine? It's a financial death sentence and it's no surprise that she's taking any and all chances at dodging it.

I'm pretty sure they're talking about KOMO, the TV station, actually. It's one of the largest stations here in Seattle. I think they take up a fair chunk of Fischer Plaza, where the fire was. Still, your point about international and national business entities failing, when a local business succeeds is pretty stupid.