The OP was stating that just because the federal govt. passed a law means the States had to accept it, because of the Supremacy clause. I was saying it's a grey area because of the perceived abuse of the Commerce clause, that any law is allowed to be passed because it relates to Commerce.

I succeed to your point, that Congress can in fact impose Law on the manner of States holding Congressional elections, which would in turn trump any state law. The Presidential election is described in Article Two, in which he's elected by Electors and it explicitly states that it's entirely under the jurisdiction of the states;

I still succeed your point though, since the Congressional election and the elector/presidential elections happens at the same place and time, Congress can pass a law the state will have to uphold.

You and me both!

1. Absolutely, but if the Constitution explicitly states that the manner in which elections are held are controlled by the States themselves, then how can the Supremacy Clause come into play?
2. I've have never read that a Treaty trumps federal law. I'm not saying it doesn't, but it doesn't make sense and the Supremacy Clause states who wins out between a conflict in the local state and elsewhere. But it does go back to point number one in that a court case states that a treaty can not convey powers to the federal govt. that the Constitution doesn't already give it. So if the Constitution says that the federal govt. can't tell the state how to handle it's election, a treaty signed by the federal govt. can't either.

And now, that's a grey area. The Constitution states that the federal govt. is not able to pass any law that is not enumerated to them via the Constitution. That is why the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" (a.k.a. Obamacare) could not be legal in any circumstances unless it was declared a tax (which the justice dept. lawyers did argue). So if the Constitution states that the state has control over their own election, then not even the federal govt. can interfere with it.

I call it a grey area because it seems that, lately, everything is related to the Commerce clause. Initially the legality of the individual mandate of the PPACA (forcing every citizen to purchase health insurance) was argued to fall under the Commerce clause, but the Supreme Court threw that out and draw a line stating that the federal govt. can not force a citizen into Commerce in order to regulate it.

A treaty allowing for non-authorized observers to be near a polling station, can not be argued to fall under the Commerce clause.

IANAConstitutionalL, but I'll play one on slashdot.

With having said that I'll say, then the agreement is illegal

The Constitution states that the states, that make up the country, have control on how elections are handled, except for a few details such as dictating when the elections can happen, but for the most part every state has control over how they handle elections. For the federal govt. to enter in an agreement that defines any procured or policy not dictated by the Constitution is effectively void and cannot be enforced.

Now one might argue that the U.S. Attorney General is going after states that pass voter ID law, and if the states can pass whatever election law they want it and trump the federal govt., how can he do that? He is able to have that right because of the 24th Amendment which states; that no one, not even the state, can deny a person's right to vote because of failure to pay a tax. If the Justice dept. is able to argue that obtaining a photo ID is looked at as having to pay a tax, then it violates the Constitution. Which explains the reason, so many states are pushing for a free photo ID program.

In short, it doesn't matter that the state law is in disagreement with the agreement, the state law trumps the agreement.

The intent of the posting was to convey that a person pays more using an incandescent bulb than a more efficient bulb, based on the extra energy usage. It doesn't matter if energy is subsidized or not, the rate will be the same with both bulbs. Therefore the effect should the same effect as a tax on the behavior (if you were to tax behavior). Adding an actual tax, ends up doubling the tax.

In my observation, people are willing to pay taxes. It's the perceived amount of taxes and what it gets spent on is the issue. When people pay taxes to fund national defense at the federal level, and first responders at a local level, it's a perceived good. When people pay taxes and find their funding studies on shrimp running on treadmills, or for "pancakes for yuppies", it's a perceived WTF. People aren't willing to pay MORE in taxes when there is so much waste with the money they have now.

It has been my experience that this is flat out mis-information. Pre-existing conditions has been a state issue (well technically health care is delegated to being state issues) and the Insurance companies has, for a long time, been forced to accept pre-existing conditions. In fact there are at least 5 states that mandate that there is a insurer of last resort that must except everyone. The difference between what the states have mandated and Obama's "Affordable Care Act", is that insurance companies have been allowed to raise the premium rate if you apply with a pre-existing condition (i.e. place you in a higher risk pool), or deny a claim if you didn't declare it. Now they are not allowed to do either (so if you pay the fee for some number of years and just go to urgent care clinics for routine wellness visits, and find out that you need thousands of dollars of medical care, you still get to turn around and sign up for insurance and pay the same rates as someone that has been carrying insurance for 20+ years and been paying their premiums the entire time).

So what Obama has done, isn't to allow pre-existing conditions, it's to make it illegal to discriminate against them in the form of premium rates.

Disclaimer, I am not an expert on law nor do I even play someone on TV that is an expert on law. This is nothing more than my opinion, how ever misguided and wrong they might be.

On the surface what you're saying sounds right but there's something nagging me that says it's wrong. Copyright is suppose to be a right, but with limitations. Fair use is one of those limitations. The protection is already there and inherently so because it's a limitation. So to say that there's nothing legally wrong in not respecting fair use doesn't sound right (not that there isn't precedence where something that is taken to an extreme nature that it's lost it's meaning).

The protection of fair use is in that the entity is projecting a copyright where they don't have a copyright (i.e. past the limits of copyright). It's no different than if someone off the street tried to sue Disney for copyright infringement on the use of Mickey Mouse. They don't have the copyright and therefor have no right to sue.

First off remember that SunView was incorporated into OpenWindows (as part of the XView toolkit). What I think you were trying to compare was SunView and NeWS. While I agree with you that SunView looked simpler, I definitely don't look back on it with as fond of memories as you do.

I was drawn to UNIX environments because of the customizing of seemingly every aspect of it. Didn't like the some magical limit... Update the header file and recompile your kernel. Didn't like the shell interface, you had plenty to choose from (okay at my time I was in awe that I had /bin/sh and /bin/csh to choose from, ksh was for pay and I was too cheap). SunView was not very customizing. Trying to program using XView (I do thank my lucky stars that I at least started programming after it was ported to X and didn't have to use the native library) was frustrating.

NeWS on the other hand was clunky, sucked up tons of memory (ugh... real time postscript interrupter running on a Sun SLC was slllooowwww) but was completely customizing. Didn't like what you see, or how it worked. Write your own add on and load it up in real time (good thing I was tops in my grade school Logo Turtle class).

ahhhh Now those were the days... Now get off my lawn!

Because the under penalty of perjury statement corresponds to being authorized to act on behalf of the person claiming infringement. Nothing about what they were submitting was true, only that they have the authorization to submit complaints.

So under the DMCA, if I see that you uploaded someplace a Disney video, I can't say "I represent Disney and you need to take it down". Someone authorized by Disney has to submit the claim.

It's a Mac... It's only functional use is as a door stop. The wedge shape has been standard for door stops for eons!!!!

The only way you can write bug-free software is to reduce it to a mathematical proof, all the way down to the OS. Yes down to the OS level, after all it's not like APIs don't have undocumented side effects. Unfortunately I haven't seen many Comp Sci classes being taught lately in algorithm analysis.

You can always test for what you know, but you can't properly test for what you don't know.

Your close but then you go off into the wrong direction. There's no reason why a company needs to do R&D when they can just come up with that one thing and patient it, or just buy a few patients and sit on them. Then rake in the royalties for years to come. Why divert all that money from the stock holders when the nest egg will be pumping out golden eggs.

I think that if a govt. wanted to really push businesses to start really developing, they need to revamp the patient system to limit the amount of time a company has exclusive access (which granted will start driving companies away) and then add economic incentive's for developing new tech.

I noticed that a lot of people seem to submit recommendations about your interaction with customers, but you could be also servicing the servers and network. If that's the case then add in there the number of outages that had no impact to the users. A power supply in a server went down, but the server had dual power supplies and no one noticed. Someone had a good idea at convening management to spring for that extra money. You connect your access switches with dual links and one of them went down?

If your going to collect metrics, let them know how much downtime the company avoided because you guys did your job. I've seen too many bad metrics around how much a person caused the company, only to find that 80/20 rule ended up biting them. 80% of the work was done by 20% of the workforce so all the murphy law scenarios only hit a limited number of people because they are the ones that did all the work. While all the people that sit back and did nothing reap'd all the metric glory.

I think you missed the point of the poster. His complaint was that with some of his instructors there was no discussion happening at all. I can only assume he was alluding to people that felt that their research was their primary purpose and the teaching was a necessary evil, never putting any effort into it.

I can stand on the same ground as him. I've had some instructors that couldn't seem to get done with class fast enough. I think that the only reason they even held the class for a full period was because of the amount of information they had to convey by the end of the semester. While quite of few others, were exactly has you described. They knew their stuff, would frequently describe new methods being used. If someone asks for more information about a topic, they could speak volumes. I just wish all my instructors were like that. Maybe I wouldn't of had to spend so much time trying learn thermodynamics on my own from the text book. Oh wait, that was the semester I discovered DikuMUD, never mind that last statement.

And with the same truthfulness you could say we have the highest corporate in the world (according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_around_the_world it's 38% federal with an additional 12% state and doesn't count local taxes). It's not until you take part in all the nice tax loopholes that you get an equivilent tax rate that's at the record lows. Unfortunately since many businesses are small, they can't afford the tax lawyers to take advantage of all the nifty loopholes.

If you actually listen to Tea Party whole stance and what many speak about at the rallies, it's to lower the tax rate overall (lowering the 38% to something reasonable) AND to get rid of the loopholes. Allow the local computer store up the street to pay the same tax rate as Best Buy down the street.

I know it's hard to actually hear words through the shrieking, but I'm sure that even you equate someone stealing from you, with your liberty. It's a question of do you equate getting charged left and right for something as stealing. I pay my sewer bill every month, I expect that that money to go to the upkeep of the sewer system. To have the sewer company turn around and tell me that they are going to charge me an extra fee depending on how much non-grass area I have in my yard (thus assuming rain run off into storm system), after I'm already paying for my use of the sewer system. Me... I find thing close to stealing from me.