Yog can confirm this, but I infer that he was dismissed for want of jurisdiction at an early stage (Absolute Write didn't/doesn't have enough contacts with Massachusetts to make it an appropriate venue for a Florida resident suing a New Hampshire resident for a business tort). Thus, this finding doesn't apply to him personally, although a judge would be entitled to rely upon those pre-lawsuit e-mails and infer that there was the same purpose as to Yog; this judge did not specifically do so, and was correct not to do so (no personal jurisdiction means nothing is valid).
"But won't Fletcher just appeal this and tie it up some more?"
Well, maybe... but not through a (competent) lawyer. Having defended a few § 6F motions (against collection agencies and mortgage brokerages) myself back in the day, the most important aspect of the order is the part labelled "Findings of Fact". The judge was really irritated at Fletcher (and his lawyer), because by making the findings of fact that he did, in the way that he did, he set this up so that to win an appeal against the order Fletcher would have to show by "clear and convincing" evidence that is already in the record that the judge's decision was not well founded in fact... and then would have to overcome the judge's discretion.
In short, Yog, you might want to consider going after Fletcher's boat with an admiralty lien... because this is a very solid sanction order indeed.
But that would necessarily mean that all of those Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly video files I've been saving up for research purposes (and to call them on it when they contradict themselves a few months down the road) would get deleted as crap.
Tongue firmly planted in cheek. Notice that I didn't say whose tongue or whose cheek... and on that note...
63 I'm more evil than you.
<span style="tongue: cheek">
I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that. That is not an enforceable contract, for three reasons:
- Legally, what Tor is doing is to solicit merchandise for consideration. That "envelope" constitutes a counter-offer that — under both the Uniform Commercial Code and the Statute of Frauds — requires a signature to be valid, not mere acquiescence. And the Copyright Act itself also requires a signed writing to transfer any portion of a copyright.
- The publisher doesn't have a "standard [royalty] rate." It varies among form, escalator clauses, timing, rights at issue, original or reprint, etc... and that's before getting into what an agent might negotiate.
- There is no number three.
</span>
I read the Quasibig Three — at the local libraries, to convince them to keep up their subscriptions, and to avoid potential conflicts of interest* — without aspiring to write fiction for them. That "conflict of interest" thing is fairly important.
That said, Scalzi is right on multiple levels. In fact, he doesn't go far enough. For two out of the three, the response time is so inexcusably slow+ that anything done to speed things up — even just dropping out the average week roundtrip for physical mailings — would help. "No simultaneous submissions" is a cop-out (not to mention yet another sign of bad management at the next level up from the line editors), even at novel length.
Further, going electronic would get rid of the font wars in submissions. The next time I see an editor claim that he/she gets a better idea of how much space an unedited submission will fill from a monospaced printed manuscript, but can't do so from any other form, I think I'll impose a properly designed study on his/her butt and demonstrate otherwise. (BTW, it's been done at book length... and demonstrated with statistical significance that monospaced manuscripts lead to less accurate castoffs.)
* Sheila may or may not connect this persona to that classmate from all those years ago (Go Bears!), and I've finagled Gordon into appearing on panels for me with malice aforethought.
+ I've been in charge of much scarier slush piles than the Quasibig Three have, and I think the longest we held a piece — even over the summer, when we were in three separate cities — was about five weeks.
Fluoridation. The corruption of our bodily essences. Not to mention mineshaft gaps...
122, 132 All of which presumes that a theocracy is ever a legitimate expression of sovereignty — a presumption that I deny, no matter how enthusiastically and unanimously the prospective governed purportedly consent to the theocracy.
I'm an equal-opportunity despiser of organized-religion-as-sovereign. It's not just about Islam, despite more years than I care to recall spent dealing (on a professional basis) with the Islamic Republic of Iran; I feel the same way about what the government of Israel has become in the last two decades, and about all the horrible examples of Christian theocracies down the years.
Side comment on "what Khameini said" (and didn't say). (N.B. I'm relying on the less-than-stellar audio quality on the BBC's online "recording" of the speech, and my conversational comprehension is really rusty...)
There is a difference between (to quote both WaPo and The Grauniad) "the Islamic Republic would never cheat" on voting matters and "candidates for deceptively high office in the Islamic Republic, which is as we all know a theocracy anyway, would never cheat" on voting matters. It's just too hard to tell from that recording, but I think Khameini did actually make that distinction... even if he later undercut it with the typical bloodcurdling threats against dissent issued by theocrats everywhere. In short, it appears that he did leave himself a little bit of rhetorical room to maneuver and back away from Ahman'jinedad if a smoking gun emerges at some point down the road.
I must respectfully disagree, in practice anyway, with one aspect of Abi's point about "sovereignty arising from the consent of the governed" (120): All too often — and Iran is far from alone in this; consider the voting rights movement in the US, as an example — sovereignty in practice extends substantially beyond those who have, or are allowed to, consent (or withhold their consent). Historically, that's particularly a problem with theocracies and conquerors. This particular theocracy is probably worse than most, in that as a matter of both political and theological imperative it denies the right of nonadherants to consent to governance (or, in the case of Israel, even exist).
There's a huge difference between "trust me, I know this stuff, and you must therefore believe x" — which is what is (properly) being attacked — and what I said, which was "trust me, I know this stuff (but I'm prohibited from giving out details), and you should therefore be cautious in blindly accepting y that does not account for those details." I didn't even say "the article is false"; I said I was grouchy about its inadequacies.
The remarks on the Persian Empire were intended to (gently) remind people that we're dealing with an area that has thousands of years of civilized history that is not congruent with the "Western Civilization" meme that dominate American (and European) education, and that trying to force a contemporary Iran into a Western reference frame is going to change the picture. I suppose I should have used the < SARCASM > tag... or made a more-sarcastic remark like "in Southwest Asia, nuance is everything." Open source is a wonderful thing... but not adequate for every purpose.
All I said was "don't jump to conclusions based on a Wikipedia article, because it's not entirely accurate and doesn't account for classified material that I can't directly discuss." I would have thought that a caution from someone with direct knowledge (even though I cannot disclose that direct knowledge, and stated why) that a Wikipedia article bearing on the history of government selection in Iran would be taken as a caution (and nothing more)... not as The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Mall Ninja.
49 Argh! I knew I was too hasty! "During the McCarthy era," not "under McCarthy."
52 Definite tentative hypothetical maybe. Further I cannot say, although I can definitely sneer knowingly.
72 Determined? No. Influenced? Perhaps. Perceptions warped? Definitely... somewhat analogous to, but with a much larger population than, Northern Ireland.
37 (referring back to 23): Avram, I'm grousing about the low quality of that article; about the better-informed-than-most-segment's unthinking reliance on unclassified information on "Ajax" that ultimately traces back to three sources, one of which is just as reliable (on the opposite wing) as was HUAC under McCarthy; and about the article's shameless attempts to view everything through a Western lens. Even two otherwise-well-respected books from respected commentators make the same sourcing errors. Unfortunately, due to that NDA I'm pretty well restricted to being grouchy about it instead of directly answering your question and stating exactly what about the article makes me grouchy.
In short, as the Operative (Serenity) said, "things are even less simple than they appear" whenever dealing with the Persian Empire... or any of its successors over the last couple of thousand years.
Just a few miscellaneous comments surrounding, and sort of impinging upon, the main post... largely due to my military-imposed nondisclosure agreement.
* It's not surprising at all that a candidate in an "Islamic Republic" would adopt green — that's like US candidates wearing flag pins. It's hard to translate (both linguistically and culturally), but green is "the color of the Prophet" in a way analogous to the flag pin is the symbol of the patriotic American; the more-than-faint whiff of hypocrisy implied is purely intentional.
* That article on the so-called "Ajax" situation isn't exactly credible. That's not a defense of what the US and other Western nations did in Iran from the late 1940s through the 1970s... fortunately, none of that is on my hands (I may whinge about being old, but I'm not quite old enough to have done anything concerning that region in the 1970s). All of that said, one must laugh at any attempt to promote Western concepts of "political stability" in Southwest Asia; understanding why would require actually knowing something about the region's history and culture, and preferably languages. Never mind; that's not going to happen in Europe, let alone the US, in the forseeable future.
* Based on what I've seen, there's very little doubt that there were substantial voting irregularities. Whether they were enough to "change" the outcome of the election is uncertain. Whether they would have been enough to "change" the ultimate policy stances of a theocracy, on the other hand, is not.
Very minor suggestion:
Pour the mushroom soaking liquid through a cheapo paper coffee filter and discard the grit that will get caught in the filter. This is a common problem with mushrooms -- the grit isn't always dirt, it's sometimes spores, but regardless it hurts the texture of whatever one is cooking.
That's a good trick whenever one is rehydrating something, like dried chiles; I even keep conical filters around that fit my kitchen funnel set. It helps that I dry my own chiles, too...
A few random comments:
* In fact, it was not legal to classify those memos. They do not fall within any of the categories of proper classified information specified in DOD Directive 5200.1-R, which is also the master guide for all US classification other than nukes. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen; a disturbingly high proportion of classifications is intended only to prevent embarassment and/or establish the classifier's importance and control of information, and has little to do with national security.
* Even in the hypothetical "ticking bomb" scenario, the probability that torture will get accurate, timely information is not measurably better than using nonviolent interrogation techniques. And, of course, any benefit that might theoretically occur depends on the interrogator knowing about the bomb, the estimated detonation time, and the subject's knowledge in the first place! Contrast that with what happened when prisoners/detainees/whateverwe'recallingthemthisweek were removed in time and location from capture...
* Clandestine services do not have a good track record for obtaining information from unwilling sources. And that's not just the US, or even the industrial era. Clandestine services specialize in either obtaining information without anyone discovering that they're doing so... or from willing sources. Analysts put information together from a wide variety of sources to come up with more avenues for intelligence activity and with intelligence assessments; and it's all multiple-sourced if it's being done right.
219 With all due respect to sources and claims, without nailing down the definition of "sales" these assertions are meaningless... as documents entered in court in several cases make clear that what B&N calls a "sale" for determining bestseller status is different from what Amazon calls a "sale" for trumpeting its market share to investors. Too, there's also a significant problem with defining the market that makes me question whether #amazonfail is asking the right question(s) in the first place.
None of which is a defense of anything; it wasn't just a hamfisted cataloging error, it was a hamfisted response. That hamfisted response just reinforces my belief in the antitrust problems.
* * *
One side note on "hamfisted": I find one aspect of the alleged cause — which I've seen ascribed both to an employee in France and to an employee in Germany — non-credible. We don't know the exact propagation speed of cataloging changes in Amazon's system, but it's substantially less than an hour in my experience. That said, look at the time differences. This stuff didn't start popping up on the 'net until the end of the business day, US time, on Friday... six hours after the end of the business day in Continental Europe, on a day (Good Friday) that many European employees work only part of the day if at all (particularly since there's no mail or private-carrier delivery in some countries!). In short, the timing doesn't make much sense. There may have been a French/German employee involved in part, but that's only part of the problem... or, perhaps, something done on purpose by that employee, which is something I'd prefer not to unwind.
Well, here's your mistake: "Since Obama is the legitimately elected POTUS..."
That's simply not possible. The wingnuts are the Permanent Majority, remember? If they're a majority, how can Obama's election possibly have been legitimate? And they wouldn't lie to us about something like that!
On the other hand, I sneer at CMS (and Turabian), and the MLA Manual, and the lowly APA and Cambridge manuals. If you want to see truly screwed-up style, you must bow before the Bluebook... which dictates exactly how many spaces must be after a period in an abbreviation, and the answer depends in part on whether the document you're writing is intended for submission to a court or not. Or whether an abbreviation that seems perfectly clear to you is, in fact, clear enough to appear in the 70-page multicolumn appendices, which include usage rules themselves.
And that's just the citation rules. Wait until you try to figure out exactly what gets italicized, or the circumstances under which the first line of a block quote is indented, or (actual example from the 12th Edition) whether "Turabian style" is hypenated or not!
Will commemorative t-shirts for the Making Light 2009 European Tour be on sale? That would really freak out the next generation... especially if anyone saw Patrick wearing one on the way to a Whisperado gig, instrument case in hand...
67 No, that's a purposeful pun... because when I get access to somebody's data, I rule it. ;-) (Ask AOL.)
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