That depends. For example many countries have laws regarding historical artifacts, you can own them but you can't take them out of the country. Or you can legally buy cryptography chips in the US that needs an export license. Just because Microsoft Ireland can legally possess the customer data in Ireland, doesn't mean they're free to ship it around the world or provide access to it in violation of Irish law.

So either you comply "voluntarily" or your lack of compliance is used as a reason do to if forcefully, either way the cops get to do whatever they want. Maybe they should start at home and repeal the 4th amendment first?

First off, B&W already has a reactor that could be up within 5 years. They are nervous about demand. What is needed is a guaranteed number of reactor buys (say 10 ) to get them moving again.

BUT, what is really needed is to focus on gen IV reactors esp. using thorium. They can burn up the old waste.

Now, with the last congress, I would have agreed with you. And IMHO, this coming CONgress is going to be a major fuck-up. HOWEVER, the GOP supports nukes. In addition, so does O. As such, I think that we will see an energy bill that will push new reactors.

Actually, Audi, GM, Ford, BMW, etc are all going to push FC cars. They are doing the EVs currently because California as well as Tesla forces the issue. But, other than nissan, all of the major car companies have said that the battery is dead and that FC are the way to the future.

That is why Gen 3 is so very important. When it comes out at say 35K and the owners have access to the Super Chargers AND Tesla is building out the new battery exchange mechanism, well, at that point, I think that the FCs makers will look foolish since relatively few cars will be sold while Tesla (and hopefully nissan) will be backed up.

BTW, I have issues with Nissan. The leaf is a POS. In fact, IMHO, all of the EVs are poorly designed except for Tesla. The leaf does not deal with heating/cooling of the batteries. The range SUX.

Any concepts "lost in translation" could be easily appended as a new word to a common tounge, there's an absurd amount of redundancy in that there are hundreds (thousands?) of ways to express simple concepts like "yes". The English say yes, the French oui, the Germans ja, the Spanish si, the Russians da, the Japanese hai, the Portugese sim, the Polish tak... is there a value to this? Language barriers are sand in the machinery for any kind of human endeavour in science, technology, commerce, travel, communities and so on. The Internet has enabled me to reach billions of people but I don't know how to talk to most of them. What they have to contribute to the global village isn't easily available to the rest and they can't access the global resources we're building. I think I read once that more than half the world's science papers are now written in English.

Sure I'd probably keep my own language for all those other reasons but I'd welcome a world where everybody could talk to everybody. Sometimes a particular concept just takes a little longer in English, that's all. For example the word "dumsnill" in Norwegian, it means something like naive but that usually implies that you're simple or gullible while this word in particular means your generosity is being exploited to taken advantage of you. I might need half a sentence to explain it in English, I don't need a whole language for that. I think the idea that some concepts are only expressible in one language is rather silly, I speak three and there's always a way of getting what I want across. Even with a simple vocabulary you can usually explain more advanced concepts without looking it up in a thesaurus.

Get used to it, you'll have more of them as you get older.

One thing I hadn't really thought about before my mother-in-law's funeral was that, if you die when you're old, most of the people at your funeral other than your family will also be old - mobility and transportation were difficult for some of her friends, there were more people with wheelchairs than the restaurant we went to afterward really knew how to handle, and there were people who didn't come because it's just too difficult, and this might have helped them some. It's not the same as being there, but sometimes you can't.

Why? SWAT teams are already armed and armored to the teeth and will assault with massive force, it's extremely rare that any of them are killed relative to the hostages. Sending in a robot to stir the hornet's nest would only lead to a massacre, either you go in full force or you don't. It could end non-hostage situations sooner but just waiting it out until the nutcase with the gun surrenders (or suicides) seems to be pretty efficient too. I guess you could have a telepresence hostage negotiator, but a smart hostage taker wouldn't give the police a live video stream to plan and time their raid with.

True, but ignorance of the law is no defense. Which basically means that not only must you know the text of the law, but the entire applicable body of law, relevant precedents and current interpretation of the law. Heck, you can still end up losing a trial because the Supreme Court will disagree with your reading of an ambiguous and previously unsettled area of law so being a psychic or clairvoyant could be quite useful. They'll try interpreting the law as intended and you bear the burden if they decide your gray area is on the illegal side.

In contract law you're not assumed to know anything about the background or history of the license except as written. Sure, if you've been negotiating a contract then that communication is relevant for the interpretation as you're one of the parties but developers and users of GPL software aren't generally in contact. You download a piece of software, accept the agreement and any ambiguity in a take it or leave it license will be almost certainly be interpreted in disfavor of the one who wrote it. Unlike the lawmaking it won't be assumed that their way to read the contract is the authoritative one.

Well, that part is actually not up to the GPL to define it's a key part of copyright law, if it's not derivative it's not covered by copyright so the GPL wouldn't apply.

Yup, that's the right thing to do.

I already ranted about fonts, but amiunique decided that my browser version (the one supported my the IT department at work) and time zone (UTF-8) and language (en-US) were enough to get uniqueness. Apparently everybody on the West Coast are running newer browsers :-)

That's fairly common here in Norway if you apply for it, they call it "account credit" though you typically don't get the 30 day free delay, you pay credit interest from day one but at least your payments don't bounce. With most terminals being online it's actually pretty hard to overdraft a debit account these days, if there's no money in the account the transaction will usually be refused.

More like the inverse debit card. When I pay with a debit card, money is withdrawn online there and then. Why can't we do the same for deposits and transfers? I just checked here in Norway and money only transfers between banks four times a day, 05.35, 11.05, 13.35 and 15.35. I guess that's fast enough for my uses, but if I pay a buddy at 4 PM why can't he buy a beer with it at 7 PM? It's not like it takes three hours to make a transaction. I understand that settling balances is hell when things change 24x7 but surely there must be some way to deal with that.

But it's usually far more than a month between theaters and DVD release. For example The Equalizer was released September 26th, DVD release is December 30th. So you get to watch it a few weeks before the others waiting for the disc, but you're still long after those who saw in in theaters stopped discussing it. Not to mention the chance of accidentally reading or hearing major spoilers, a month after release people don't put up the big spoiler warnings anymore. It sucks more for some kind of movies than others, for some that's really a downer.

If someone posts a photo taken by me I have a copyright claim.
If someone posts a photo taken of me by a hidden camera in the shower it's under a different law.
If someone posts a biography written by me I have a copyright claim.
If someone posts a biography written about me it might be libel, but not copyright infringement.

I really don't understand what kind of twisted logic they used to arrive at the conclusion that the actor has any kind of copyright claim, it's always belonged to the one pointing the camera or holding the pen. Assuming the cameraman is making a work for hire it'll pass from him to the company who hired him, the subject never had a claim nor was ever given a claim. It sounds like they wanted to arrive a conclusion and made bizarre leaps of logic to make it happen. I'm sorry but she should have filed a lawsuit and gotten a court to take it down, this copyright claim is simply fraudulent and to add insult to injury she should probably be prosecuted under the "penalty of perjury" clause.