dorbie

Does this building make my bum look big?

Take your car for an engine tune-up month. Just do it, if you can't do it yourself any time in May, take it in for whatever service is due & get the timing & ignition checked.

By what mechanism? I'm not convinced there's sufficient competition or elasticity to do this.

For the rare occasions they are needed. If you think a gun ban would mean they would no longer be required then you are simply wrong.

Not really, I'm saying that claiming a member of an armed response team was placed at additional risk because he carried a gun doesn't make much sense. It's what he does, sending unarmed men into such situations would not present much of an alternative to beat cops. ...to put it another way sending an unarmed response team to specialize in confronting armed men would be a greater risk.

The cop was armed because the man was armed. The cop was in a special armed response squad. The cop chose to take exceptional risks in the line of his special duties to protect others. Guns are necessary tools, they are RARE in the UK but the balance is at best on the side of too restrictive if you've ever lived rurally. It would be untenable to ban weapons of the sort used in this case, they are already well controlled and have significant utility. Given that guns have a legitimate role in society we need armed police volunteers like this man to go in and deal with the situation as he'd done on several occasions.

Since by armed you mean in posession of a gun, the policeman would not have been armed. no, sorry.... i mean if the policeman had been armed and the killer was unarmed no sorry...... this was in Britain, so you need to define armed. Your post CLEARLY implied armed with guns. Nothing else is realistic w.r.t. disarming the civilian in his own home. Are you suggesting British police be armed with guns now or that all sharp or heavy objects be banned from homes? You can play fantasy confrontation all you like but at the end of the day you're either proposing some remedy or saying something very silly.

Since by armed you mean in posession of a gun, the policeman would not have been armed.

Perhaps he means you should be required to drown foxes and other pests with water pistols.

uhh..... used for pest control?!? Yes pest control. Small projectile large cartridge. Popular for lamping foxes with some in rural UK. A very effective tool.

Bill - you just made a great argument for nationalizing the oil refining industry in the USA. Such a necessity for life as we know it in much of the USA should not be prone to artificial manipulation by a select few. They don't need to be nationalized. They can be forced to sell their refineries, or split them. That leaves more bidders for crude but at least the crude middlemarket already exists. What you need is more independent competition and players refining crude independent of the retail channel where some will choose increase capacity, and if they shut a refinery if it was the only one (or maybe one of two) they operated that would be a hefty incentive to fire that sucker back up. It is looking like they need to be split up, but it needs an investigation and audit by truly independent folks.

Competition if it were real, if not from an existing producer then from a new player who might build or purchase a refinery. It could also avert government intervention. It is actually anti-competitive and illegal for a cartel to reduce capacity and therefore supply to drive up costs.

No, no, YOU'RE the catcher.

Catcher tries to help batter remove bat after an unfortunate accident at the plate.

....with scars 'n shit. You may have reached your zenith.

Not in the traditional sense. Supply. in the oil market, is artificially controlled - specifically the gasoline supply, through bogus outages and purposefully lacking refining capactity. I'm with you there, I've mentioned these here before. We haven't seen this kind of manipulation since Enron reamed CA. They went bust for other reasons and the real billion dollar robbery went unpunished, despite smoking gun tapes of market manipulation by laughing employees. It has emboldened the oil companies.

They only let us have hook knives for a reason.

....and puts the cash right back in their pockets the next day. If you really wanted to make an impact you'd suggest that people don't drive for a day, otherwise this is just a no-op.

That's not what I said at all. It's amazing that in the same post you profess knowledge of industry use when you don't know or confuse what I mean when I say rendering inside production studios. Samba was the issue there and that was crystal clear from my posts and interoperability is impacted by DMCA, as are many other spheres of engineering. There is more than one issue as I've been saying. Apart from that, clearly you're overlooking the Kalidescape lawsuit and the studios pursuing ESS, all over a product that is used to rip your personal DVD collection to a redundant hard drive array for personal use in your home theatre. As for your condescending tone, you're playing the apologist who doesn't understand the bigger picture or doesn't care about what happens to people impacted who are off your radar. You're left with no place to retreat to so you resort to mockery of a position I never took. You're going too far when you appeal to your own authority with assumptions about my experience. Frankly you have a cheek calling me a 3 jump wonder to your Fastrax.

Only in the good old USA... where tort reform is an oxymoron. I'm sure the public backlash against this judge will be enough to get him out of the courtroom. He is making himself out to look fucking ridiculous. Have you any idea how difficult it is to find a pair of pants that (for example) you can fit a penis pump inside? http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-08-18-judge-sentenced_x.htm Look if a judge is prevented from wearing his 'special' pants for his first day on the bench then who are we to judge what the damages should be set at? We have NO idea what he wanted those pants for, he may have had something very special in mind. Thankfully there are better judges than this, the sad thing is you can file something like that and remain a free man. P.S. this post is just my opinion, and should in no way be read to imply that Roy Pearson the missing 'special' pants judge would ever get up to the shenanigans of Donald Thompson, the masturbating penis pump judge. I don't think he would.

If you use a mac you use a derivative of Free BSD, the original free OS, and definitely Open Source, many other components are similarly derived. The free in free software means "liberty", i.e. the freedom to look at and modify the code. Apple can explain better than I why Free BSD, Linux and similar OS' are attractive options to informed computer users: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/unix/ I particularly like their "Come on in it's OPEN" sign, it sums it up nicely. But it's not about you DSE, I don't give a shit if you use Linux or not, in major effects studios it dominates esp. for rendering etc. I do care about others rights to use and modify it and run the functionality THEY have legally written. Regardless of how you spin it or where you see the authority coming from, the right of a user to make copies of their media for example to transfer from their CD to their ipod for personal enjoyment has been undermined by the DMCA such that it is eviscerated in the case of DVDs through legal intimidation entirely because of the provisions of the DMCA in relation to copy protection, worse, decryption code essential in players is deemed illegal. As for licensing technologies, what technology? Someone buys a DVD and they need an additional license to play it? Maybe you think so but the only reason a legitimately reverse engineered product has issues, is the DMCA. If it was about licensing the DMCA would be a non issue they could pursue players over their claimed I.P. not over copy protection circumvention. You think a search on sourceforge undoes the damage of the DMCA? You present a fig leaf as if DVD Jon was not prosecuted after pressure from the State Department, and incredulously claim that major distros don't ship the css lib with mplayer by some support oversight, that's utter crap. The don't ship them for fear of the legal ramifications of the DMCA w.r.t. copy protection circumvention. They'd love to ship the lib & the code to compile it. Samba does not need to license squat, this is an interoperability product that has been legitimately reverse engineered and faces DMCA threats over encryption based protocols, which threaten to allow monopolies to control access to their customers data. Many corporations and almost all major effects studios have farms of Linux systems to perform their rendering these days, the hardware the serious effects tools run on is also designed using Linux systems, most chips are sold these days are designed using large clusters of Linux systems. Samba is a key component of the interoperability required to make this work. Major corporations like IBM support Linux and along with several others pool their patents to protect the operating system from the predatory practices you pretend Linux flouts. Like it or not Linux is pervasive and for good reason, just something else you were unaware of. In any case, that you perceive any user group to be in the minority is absolutely no reason to ignore their rights, and you should be ashamed for suggesting that, but it's merely ONE of many issues with the DMCA riding roughshod over consumer rights, to the detriment of the public good.

Not if the judge has a say in the matter, and I think he will: Silly woman was stopped TWICE (edit THRICE, with a written warning was on the second occasion) for driving while suspended and insults the judge by claiming ignorance. Riiiiiight, and you just forgot all about the first (edit the first TWO) traffic stop(s). I have a sincere hope and expectation that Miss Hilton will learn from this. See, it's working already.

That's Answers.com entry is ripped from wikipedia and obviously this part is bullshit.

That doesn't say very much of anything. Fair use includes concepts like first-sale which protects the individual's right to make copies and transfer media, it's what protects some of iTunes' functionality. But I'm pretty sure that if I purchase a DVD I should have the right to play it in my DVD player on my Linux machine using readily available software without being branded a criminal, thanks to the DMCA I can't. The MPAA et.al. lobbying for their own benefit has caused other serious problems leading to abuse for example threatening those who reverse engineer remote file access or login password schemes (not cracking users password mind you, just allowing them to log in with their own passwords remotely). Ever used Samba? I have it's bloody IMPORTANT to me and many others, a lot more important than movies. The artists might just start giving a shit when all the linux software they happily use gets the shaft due to monopolistic prohibitions that get creative with the DMCA and their intranets become illegal or crippled. But just move along folks, nothing to see here, we've not lost any rights according to some and fair use is a mere legal technicality according to others.