I see an easy way around that problem: give police officers special IR or radio remotes that they can point at a self-driving car to tell it to stop. Specially mark self-driving cars that recognize those remotes. Let the driver (maybe) have a way to override the stop signals just in case those remotes fall into the wrong hands, depending on how likely that seems to occur.

Insider trading is not legal for Congress:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsal...

Yes, yes, the article is about rolling back parts of the STOCK Act. But look at the bottom: insider trading is still illegal for Congress under the reformed law.

I understand your parents' perspective. They are scammers impersonating a well-known company with a reputation to protect. Banks send out notices warning about email scams; I don't know if they do anything further, but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't at least forward reports to the police. Personally, that's what I think Microsoft should have done in that situation. Even if the police do nothing, at least they're doing their part reporting it.

/etc/rc.d/rc.S on my Slackware system is 400 lines of bash. That doesn't look too complex to me.

As long as people don't start depending on systemD, I have no problem. It's like ALSA versus PulseAudio: you want to run that on your system, fine, but I'll stick with ALSA kthx please don't rip out support for it.

Lol. I used SLAMD64, too. Good distro. I actually upgraded from it to the AMD64 version of Slackware when it came out without having to reinstall. Good times.

phantomfive is being a douchebag.

I've never considered intelligence a liability, so I'm curious why you do. Could you elaborate on specifically why you think this, give some examples, etc.?

> If someone created that commercial movie, of course, they're are going to want to sell it. Who else, besides the owner, should have a right to sell movie tickets or DVDs for that movie? Pirates? Consumers? Who's being silly now?

Still you :)

The donut analogy fails because other people can sell donuts that look and taste exactly like the donut shop owner's donuts. This is normal competition and is a good thing. If the donut owner has some patented formula where only he can sell specific types of donuts, that's a statutory monopoloy again, but it's a patent monopoly, so let's focus on copyright.

As far as "who else should have the rights?", let's start with noting that, in the absence of copyright, everyone would have the rights to create and sell copies of the work. For works that are sufficiently old, this is what happens, with the result that you can pick up the complete works of Shakespeare for $3.99 off Amazon (fake example don't ask me for a link). All of society benefits from these lower prices, much more than societies benefit from cheap donuts because donuts are bad for you and lead to obesity and other health problems.

Of course, the problem with zero copyright is that the creators don't get paid and, therefore, many people who would create copyrighted works if they could monopolize the sales of them will instead choose not to create copyrighted works. There are a number of ways to resolve this. One way would be just having the government directly pay people to write books, paint artwork, and make movies. There are problems with that. Another way is copyright. There are also problems with that.

All in all, I think giving copyright owners some type of time-limited monopoly over their works is a good idea. So, to answer, "Who should have the rights?", I'd answer, "the creator only for about 20 years, and then everyone". It's not that copyright is bad -- it's a creative solution to a real problem. The issue is that right now, copyright lasts for 70 years past the death of the author. That's too damn long: most copyrighted works make a lot of money at first, and then revenue goes way down, so, pretty soon after the work is released, we could expire copyright on it and the creators wouldn't lose much, but society would gain quite a bit. 20 years is plenty of time for Marvel to recoup its costs for all their big-budget movies about buff men with giant, magical hammers.

But, like I said before, my opinions on copyright aren't really relevant to whether copyright is a monopoly. It is, and it is so described. This is true no matter what you think of it.

---linuxrocks123

It's often possible to get a judge to pierce through shams like that. Not saying it was in that case. But sometimes.

The monopoly is that only you get to sell that particular movie. So, you have a monopoly on the market for that individual movie.

People with all sorts of different views on copyright refer to the construct as a statutory monopoly. Stop being silly.

> In the UK you would end up in jail for the stuff they say.

Then shame on the UK.

Yes, deletionists are asshats.

One thing you can do is use the Wayback Machine to get the text of deleted articles. I learned about that trick on Wikipedia itself. Why can't they just include the page history of deleted pages well that's a really good question.

Deletionpedia is the protest response against deletionist asshats, but it's just getting started. It would be nice if an administrator leaked the text of all previously deleted articles to Deletionpedia. They actually KEEP THE DELETED ARTICLES ON WIKIPEDIA'S SERVERS and just DON'T LET ANYBODY LOOK AT THEM except the Anointed Ones. It's not even a disk space issue why they delete stuff. There's no justification at all; it's pure Vogonism.

So, come on, inclusionist administrators: which one of you would like to be the Internet's Prometheus? It wouldn't even be copyright infringement because the creators of the content licensed it CC to put it in Wikipedia to begin with. WE ALL own those deleted articles, not the tyrant bureaucrats at the Wikimedia Foundation. You'd be like Edward Snowden except you'd just be perma-banned from Wikipedia instead of your home country. Have some balls. Get 15 minutes of fame. BRING LIGHT TO THE WORLD.

If someone wants to kickstart a campaign to bribe an administrator into leaking all deleted articles to Deletionpedia, I'll put up $100. Maybe more. I'm not kidding. THIS IS THE GOOD FIGHT.

---linuxrocks123

I think stomache acid probably destroys SD cards. Also, I think it would probably be poisonous; heavy metals and all...

Better is to just let them delete the video. They're probably stupid enough not to do it right, so you can undelete it later. I said something like this very recently in another thread, actually, about the guy where the NY cops actually did delete his video.

I'm going to go WAAAAY out on a limb here and speculate that these bullying asshole police officers weren't tech-savvy enough to know how to permanently delete stuff from a cell phone. Most likely, a simple FAT file system undeletion utility could have brought back all those pictures, or at least most of them. Does anyone know if the victim here did anything to try to get those photos undeleted?

Of course the Federal Reserve is a government agency. Congress created it. Congress can shut it down if it wants. It's not "accountable" because being accountable means, "politicians can fuck with it". And whoever the current President is would have a strong temptation to force the Federal Reserve to enact an inflationary monetary policy just before an election, because such a policy would cause a temporary increase in economic growth, and the negative effects of the inflation would not be felt until some time later. So, it's done exactly like the Supreme Court*: the President appoints the Board of the Federal Reserve System, the Senate confirms the appointments, and, afterwards, the President can't fire or control the appointed official. Are you going to claim the Supreme Court isn't part of our government?

*Except that Congress can't fire a Supreme Court justice but could completely rewrite the Federal Reserve Act and fire whoever they wanted at any time.

Weimar Republic was a special case. Punitive measures put on Germany (reparations) gave the Weimar Republic fewer options than the US would have. The US has the options of the following:

1. Telling foreign creditors to get stuffed.
2. Declaring all bond debt null and void.
3. Declaring SOME bond debt (say, those bonds held by rich people -- not saying I support this, just that it's an option) null and void.
4. Many other "creative" options I haven't even thought of.

The Weimar Republic could do none of this. It was a weak, unpopular, unstable government that was also under the boot of foreign oppressors. A US federal government bankruptcy would look much different.

And you don't have to go to precious metals anyway. Corporate stocks, real estate, and inflation-adjusted bonds also track inflation.