An eagle eating a pair of great tits ?

Small pocket coin-purse is really useful.

They're like £2 or so in any market, or even on Amazon or eBay - http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B008K09YAY/

Also, you don't need to carry your wallet, with lots of notes in; you can pay a bus fare and buy a sandwich or a beer or two with that pocket-full of coins.

US coins come from the US Mint, bills from the Federal Reserve.

In a normal transition, banks get lots of $1 bills, return them to the government and get $1 coins in exchange.

But, because of the turf war between two arms of government, the Fed keeps printing new $1 bills and exchanging them for old ones, rather than taking in the $1 bills and replacing them with coins.

Equilaterally curved (Reuleux) heptagons work fine. The UK 50p and 20p use that shape, and they roll.

They have constant diameter, but not constant radius.

This is why Spain is breaking up - because (comparatively) rich Catalans are objecting to paying taxes for the south and west.

Italy has had this same problem for years; relatively rich Lombards, Piedmontese and even Tuscans object to funding the Mezzogiorno and the Sicilian Mafia. The Lega Nord is a political party based on that principle.

Britain is different - Scotland has almost exactly the average income for the UK, and that's the bit that's closest to leaving.

Buy a third-party PS3 clone that doesn't require the signing keys.

True. I'm not a lawyer, but I work for them.

But, of course, it is quid pro quo - they're paying you, that's what makes them an employer.

The legal term is "consideration". As long as they give you something - anything - of value, then the contract is valid (in this respect).

If you're volunteering, then it's different - if you volunteer for a charity or your church, then they really don't have a claim on anything you create while you're there.

That would be a breach of the Berne agreement by the US (specifically, that copyright cannot be dependent on registration, and that would include transfer of copyright).

Why should a non-US citizen, employed by a non-US company have to file paperwork in the US?

Turn it around - that would mean that every single person who worked on Windows would have to file paperwork in every country in the world before Microsoft could release it in that country. That's mad.

The alternative is to abolish work-for-hire (which I would support) and that the most an employer could contract for would be a transferable non-exclusive licence for the duration of the copyright as it stood at the time of the fixation of the work. That would also kill off corporates' vested interest in copyright extension.

Personally, I would prohibit all transfers of copyright; the author or their estate would be the only holder; everyone else would be a licensee. This would also mean that their estate could not be completely wound up until 50/70 years after death.

Not really.

Number of people is also number of potential customers. That's why there are more jobs in the USA than in Luxembourg - there are 311 million people in the USA and only half a million in Luxembourg. Curiously enough, adding the extra 310.5 million people resulted in there being a lot more jobs.

Corporations have power, partly because so many people lack the self-confidence to negotiate terms of an employment contract, and even fewer will pay a lawyer to actually review the contract and negotiate. This is why C?Os get much better terms (not just a higher salary) - they do negotiate contracts and get a lawyer or an agent to make sure it's done properly.

But mostly because employment is so much more efficient these days. We can produce everything everyone needs and many of the things people want with much less than 100% of people in work. If you're at a significant risk of unemployment, then you don't have a strong negotiating position. The only way to fix that is to make unemployment nicer. The less bad unemployment is, the harder it is for employers to screw people over.

On the other hand, Edison then employed other people to work for him on inventions and filed patents in his own name on their inventions because otherwise he (who had paid them to invent) had no claim on their inventions.

I'd want an "in the ordinary course of their duties" clause (ie, "if, in the ordinary course of their duties, the employee makes a patentable invention, then the patent rights to said invention vest in the employer as a work for hire").

IOW, your job should specifically involve you in doing original work - like a programmer (though I oppose software patents), or a design engineer, or a pharma chemist or chemical engineer. Then your invention belongs to your employer - because they were paying you to invent things as your job (or part of your job).

More likely: "the people in our office on a holiday weekend hadn't a clue how to do their jobs and didn't know how to reinstate a channel. By the time they got hold of somebody on the phone who was both competent and sober, the event had finished."

When will October 1993 finally arrive?

Posted on September 6943, 1993

This is one of the rare cases where England is correct and Britain isn't - Scotland has different laws on this and encryption is OK there.

Wales follows England's laws. I have no idea about Northern Ireland.

There are dozens of websites that are ad-funded and include Maxim photo-shoots and up-skirt and down-blouse pics of celebrities and clips of sex scenes from Hollywood movies and an occasional Playboy celeb and clothed porn stars.

Most of them perceive themselves as gossip sites aimed at a male audience, but their appeal is basically about pics of attractive women in little or tight clothing. Isn't that soft porn? Some of them show topless pics and "camel-toe", some don't.

So where is your definition? - sexy bikini/lingerie pics (US Maxim, Victoria's Secret), topless (the Sun, UK Maxim, FHM), naked but not showing more than nipples (Zoo, Nuts), naked but not showing much (Playboy), naked and showing everything (Hustler).

What about Hollywood films with sex scenes in them. Want to have topgun.xxx ? sincity.xxx ?

How about advertising: dietcoke.xxx ?

Now there is plenty of real porn out there, and yes the Skinemax-type soft porn is dead. But soft porn is porn that won't admit it's actually porn. Once it admits it's porn, then the drive to harder and harder core kicks in until you reach the point where people start getting turned off rather than on (and then it diversifies into fetishes).

But nothing I listed above apart from Hustler would describe itself as porn. Not even Playboy. Playboy do porn too, but they would regard the magazine as being more like Maxim than Hustler. And they'd be right.