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Comment Re:Uh... Yeah? (Score 1) 242

Try spying on the US communications systems for the Russians, and see what happens when they catch you. Apparently, not OK with Americans.

It's OK If We Do It. America is the Shining City on the Hill, chosen by Providence to spread God's word and God's electronic eavesdropping to all the nations of the earth.

It's NOT OK with everyone else. And yes, they count.

United States

30% of Americans Aren't Ready For the Next Generation of Technology 191

sciencehabit writes: "Thanks to a decade of programs geared toward giving people access to the necessary technology, by 2013 some 85% of Americans were surfing the World Wide Web. But how effectively are they using it? A new survey suggests that the digital divide has been replaced by a gap in digital readiness. It found that nearly 30% of Americans either aren't digitally literate or don't trust the Internet. That subgroup tended to be less educated, poorer, and older than the average American."

Comment Re:Probably not wrong (Score 2) 228

Part of my understanding is that a 501(c)3 is a public, mutual benefit corporation where all assets are actually owned by the public, should push come to shove.

I'm sorry, but you're confused -- that's not correct at all. The assets of a 501(c)3 have to be transferred to another exempt organization if the organization shuts down, but they are in no way owned by the public. We had that baked into our articles of incorporation but I'm not sure if that's a requirement.

501(c)3s can include religious corporations and public-benefit nonprofit corporations. A public corporation is something completely different, a corporation set up by a government; for example, some state universities are set up this way. A mutual-benefit corporation, which includes some co-ops, insurance companies, and other groups set up to benefit their members, cannot be a 501(c)3.

Comment Re:Sue them for all they're worth (Score 1) 495

No-IP domains are used 93 percent of the time for Bladabindi-Jenxcus infections,

If I set up malware on my home PC and use DynDNS then DynDNS domains are used 100% of the time to serve my malware.

So maybe Microsoft are saying that 93% of infections come via No-IP domains. That might be a tiny fraction of the overall No-IP domains.

What's next, a RICO prosecution for the owners of No-IP?

Or for Microsoft?

Comment Re:Boards or ROM's (Score 2) 133

When I was about 15, there was a Laundromat down the street with an old Asteroids game where the vector monitor worked fine except that the beam never turned off, so you could see how it sat dead center in the screen most of the time, then drew a line from one asteroid to the next, to the next, etc. as it rendered a frame.

Let me guess... eventually it burned a hole all the way through the centre of the screen until one day it got through and (a) blasted the woman whose job it was to collect the change from the machines' head off or (b) lasered her, segment-by-segment- via an early-80s pseudo-computer-effect- into the Asteroids machine itself where she was forced to play life and death computer games and interact with anthropomorphic, sentient realisations of abstract computer concepts, while finding some way to prove that she *was* due the five hours overtime they'd refused to pay her?

Comment Re:But the Tokyo area is so crowded (Score 2) 133

Secondly, even in Tokyo proper if you travel to any point in the city that is more than a 10-15 minute walk from a station(and there are plenty of them) you will find plenty of run-down and abandoned buildings. Property in Tokyo seems to follow an inverse square law, the value is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the closest station.

Which begs the question- would it be worth someone's time to buy some of these unwanted out-of-the-way buildings and then fund (possibly fully) the construction of a line and station covering that area?

That quite obviously wouldn't be cheap- to put it mildly- but given the ludicrous value of some buildings and land in Tokyo, the returns could be huge.

Comment Re:Good? (Score 1) 273

I'm a socialist. I think that some government regulation and redistributive taxes are generally a good idea. However, taxis are an example where this approach fails spectacularly, in theory taxi regulation should protect consumers and provide a decent living wage for drivers. In practice, taxi companies pay cities (in form of taxi licenses) to bar competing companies.

Comment Re:Bad media coverage (Score 1) 1330

Except that if you read the majority opinion they actually open up any provision of the law to challenge on the same grounds. They warn that the ruling should not be taken as covering anything covered by insurance, but presumably any such thing could in principle be challenged on the same basis, and depending on the circumstances might likewise be exempted. The majority has opened the door to challenging the application of any provision of this law to a closely held corporation -- indeed any provision of any law. They just don't know how the challenge will turn out.

It's interesting to note that the court broke down almost exactly on religious lines when dealing with contraception. Five of the six Roman Catholic justices voted with the majority, and all three Jews joined by one dissenting Catholic. I think this is significant because the majority opinion, written exclusively by Catholics, seems to treat concerns over contraception as sui generis; and the possibility of objections to the law based on issues important to other religious groups to be remote.

Another big deal in the majority opinion is that it takes another step towards raising for-profit corporations to the same status as natural persons. The quibbling involved is astonishing:

....no conceivable definition of 'person' includes natural persons and non-profit corporations, but not for-profit corporations.

Which may be true, but it's irrelevant. The question is whether compelling a for-profit corporation to do something impacts the religious liberties of natural persons in exactly the same way as compelling a church to do that same thing. If there is any difference whatsoever, then then the regulations imposed on the church *must* be less restrictive than the regulations imposed on a business. Logically, this is equivalent to saying the regulations imposed on a business *may* be more restrictive than the regulations imposed on a church.

Comment Re:His choices... (Score 5, Insightful) 194

The feds threat was six months, not 10+ years.

Bullshit. Threatening "50 years if you make us go to trial, but if you confess we'll recommend six months but the court can still give you 50 years" is still threatening 50 years. The threat of heavy sentences to get people to waive the right to a trail is an egregious violation of due process and the the guarantee against cruel and unusual punishments.

Comment Re:Snuck [Re:wifi is slow [Re:His choices...]] (Score 1) 194

I suggest that you e-mail the 784,000 web pages that say Aaron Swartz snuck into the closet, and inform them they're using the English language wrong:

They're not using the English language wrong, they're reporting the facts wrong. Just as the mainstream media did for decades in the War on (Some) Drugs, just as they did in the run-up to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the media is lying and/or negligently passing on the government's story.

Comment Re:Jurisdiction (Score 1) 210

Copyright, as in "intellectual property", is a notion that exploded from The Shining City on the Hill, namely Jesus's country, America. We've rammed each and every treaty down the world's throat for almost thirty years. Now that it's established, of course European copyright lords are helping seal us in with our cask of Amontlliado. But it is American in origin.

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