And, certainly such a treaty does exist, else no court in the USA would have had jurisdiction to demand the payments. And, from the standpoint of operating websites, it is pretty easy to block whole countries from seeing your website. All it takes is editing a .htaccess file.

As to the banking issue, France is a signatory of a treaty within the European Community of Nations as well as the United States to sanction Iran regarding their development of atomic weapons. This is an agreement between the United States government, France and all like-minded governments that have decided that the sanctions are appropriate in view of the non-proliferation agreement signed by Iran (that's right, Iran under the Shah, but Iran, nonetheless).

Now, I am not an attorney and I do not play one on television, but my work takes me, quite frequently, into this area of international law, usually set up by treaties. In the United States, treaties are negotiated and signed by the Administration (the Executive) and ratified by the United States Senate. Many other countries also have a separate ratification process that follows a negotiation and signature. These treaties give the various courts in the various countries jurisdictionÃ"even though the violation did not occur within the borders of that court's country.

That is how international law works.

"but is it reasonable for her to deprive her child of the support and help of someone he loved just because that person said something stupid?"

Yes, you see, here is the crux of the problem. What is said is hurtful, tasteless and beyond the privilege afforded to your sister in this case. The child might have loved the person your sister portrayed and your sister might have even been the best intellectually disabled volunteer walking planet Earth. She may not have even meant it in that light. However she disowned all of that by making hurtful comments about her own work, that she could even mouth the words to see them in that light is the problem. So, the child may have been deprived of the most awesome disabled volunteer to walk this planet, but it was your sister whose actions caused that behavior. We all make mistakes, and mistakes have consequences. Some more grave than others. It's a lesson most children learn early, some a little later than others and in this case a lot later.

Is the mob always right? Of course not, but in this case and your sister's.. spot on.

I'm glad someone can assemble Ikea furniture!

I'm old. incredibly old. In fact, I wonder how it is that my old corpse is still walking around among you folks.

Why, back in my day, we had rocks. And we pounded them together to make sounds. And those sounds were used to communicate over long distances, like 100 feet or so (but we didn't have feet yet, so we used rocks).

And we liked it!

The GIMP dead on Windows?!

The following was posted on the GIMP Website:

It's been a long time since we last had an active Windows-based developer. Consequently, GIMP has accumulated a plethora of bugs specific for that operating system. As much as we'd like to provide a smooth user experience for Windows users, we simply do not have the required human resources.

Hence, if you are an experienced Windows-based developer who is interested to help GIMP become a first-class citizen in the Windows world, please get in touch with us. Our main communication channels are the gimp-developer mailing list and IRC.

I received a copy of Photoshop Elements with a drawing tablet sold by Wacom for my daughter recently. It does seem to work. Perhaps Adobe is not improving it, but one does not expect Elements to do everything Photoshop does.

I think that Paint.net may have given way to PIXLR Editor for simple tweaking and enhancing.

There are a few Mac-only apps as well, but I gather you may not have a Mac, based on your statement about The GIMP.

I'm still using Photoshop CS3 (version 10), which I only upgraded because Photoshop 7 was so seriously out of date that it would not work on my new computer. I did download Photoshop CS6 when it was in Beta and I do like many of the capabilities of it, but nothing there was make or break for me.

I am using Dreamweaver CS 5.5 because it actually does more. I can see how web pages will look on iOS as well as Android smartphones. I also can work much more easily with HTML5 and CSS3. It also does a lot better work checking my php and JavaScript. So that upgrade was actually useful. I am very pleased with the fact that I have not paid every one to two years for the upgrades, which would have cost a lot more than simply buying new versions as I really needed to upgrade.

Adobe's upgrade policy, until December, was that if anyone still owned CS3 applications they would have to pay full price and get new software. They have since modified that stance because someone who is really smart must have told them that the upgrade path is an actual incentive.

Adobe's correct stance should be crystal clear: They ought to offer an upgrade path from the CS2 applications that is time-limited. There are always people who are going to buy gray-market or "used" software who will never pay what Adobe wants and never properly register their software. But there are people who may well be very attracted by an upgrade path.

It's not that difficult: the Google+ folks want real-world info for ad-tracking, while the other systems (YouTube, etc) don't care as long as you're viewing their stuff.

>> Different mixes and levels for different apps

Weird... I wanted that feature, and that's exactly why I was installing PulseAudio for a year before Ubuntu picked it up as a standard. PulseAudio makes per-app mixing just work, whereas before Pulse came around I had never seen any OS do that since the BeOS.

Not the only one. Hell, I was setting up pulseaudio by hand for a year or so before it became the standard on Ubuntu, just because it made things work _so_ much better.

However, the reports of it borking things are consistent enough to convince me we might be in a minority.

> I live in Raleigh, NC, and for those who have a jaundiced perspective of the south I would like to say that this region is booming in terms of technology-centric business

You know, maybe it's because I've always lived to the south of you (Atlanta), but I never really applied the negative southern stereotype to North Carolina, not until you amended your constitution just a couple weeks ago.

It will be interesting to see how that decision affects the state in the medium term... stereotypes and reputation like that can have a lot of impact on whether companies choose to set up shop there.

This isn't flamebait. Parent is referring, sarcastically, to the common analog of the "blame the victim" argument the grandparent is making.

> Put the same equipment in a manned aircraft and it's a snoozer.

Interesting point. I guess on some level, we're hoping that with a manned aircraft, an egregiously and obviously illegal order to target U.S. citizens might be disobeyed or even made public.