Technically, the constitution allows the "United States" to own land. It does not name the government as an owner.

The government of the United States is not the United States. Being a republic, the United States is its citizens.

The government is a manager/caretaker of state's (people's) property, not an owner of property in and of itself.

Technically, the government doesn't even have any authority of its own. It's strictly a body that executes the state's (people's) will, and it does so by the state's (people's) authority - not its own authority (hence the Democracy part). (Officially, the government does nothing of its own accord - hence why in court it's 'the state vs whoever', not 'the government vs whoever').

So, technically, there is no 'government property' - there is only state (people's) property.

Actually, the reason that 'eminent domain' is 'eminent' (i.e. obvious - aka 'obvious domain') - is because the land has always belonged to the state - because the state is the only authority. You never actually own your personal land, you're simply entitled to be the sole occupant. You can buy/sell that right, but the land always has, does, and always will, belong to the state. So under eminent domain, the land is not actually taken from you, because it never belonged to you, hence why the state's domain is eminent (obvious).

In any case, land has this weirdness to it, where all land is state land, and everyone is the state, and no land is private, and all that ever happens is people are bestowed an authority to exclusively manage/reside on a given plot that they never really own. In any case, that authority ends up being functionally equivalent to actual ownership. The phrase 'if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck' comes to mind, because when you have a body of case law that treats property as if private property actually exists, then in a sense, it does exist for all practical purposes - so there is a disconnect between the practical nature of 'land ownership' and the official/ideological nature of 'the state (the people) having authority over all at all times'.

Also, this is why you can't have an allodial land title in the U.S.. So long as it's still U.S. land, it can never truly be privately owned. It's simply incompatible.

Interestingly, way back when before the U.S. was founded, private ownership of land was associated with monarchy - where some royal(s) individual(ly) literally owned the country. The path of events that eroded royal authority and empowered lower levels of society, was the same path that eroded [true] private land ownership, because it introduced the concept of inherent ownership/rights of some other groups (e.g. the people).

-scheherazade

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1) Depends
2) WHY?!?
3) Dunno. It shrinks as girls age, possible it helps keep germs etc out before, you know, anything else might need to go there.
4) The same way as women prolly. Winky Face. I'd wager men have probably _seen_ about as much, or possibly more, hymen (Hang on, plural of hymen? Hymens?) than women given-
a) I don't imagine it's actually that easy for women to see their own hymen - feel free to correct me on this ladies.
b) Gynecology, as indeed almost all of the medical specialist areas, has been the domain of men until recently.

Oh, and I did google it and I don't regret it because of this entry on the wikipedia page:
"In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, medical researchers used the presence of the hymen, or lack thereof, as founding evidence of physical diseases such as "womb-fury", i.e. (female) hysteria. If not cured, womb-fury would, according to these early doctors, result in death."

One wonders what treatment they might have prescribed for WOOOMB-FURY!!!!

given the era, most of his movies are now in the public domain :
https://archive.org/details/movies?and[]=buster%20keaton

Whether you want to or not, I am master of this domain and immune to your impotent attempts to hinder my greatness.

Mess with the best, die like the rest.

*ban


Root Domain Power
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFUaxWXl0zM

I hate it when this happens:

"Please enable Javascript to play this video properly. If you're using NoScript, please whitelist these domains: vid.me, viddme.blob.core.windows.net, d3d22t4ev2lc8b.cloudfront.net, and d1kjvq24a07es4.cloudfront.net

If you're viewing this inside an app with Javascript disabled, follow this link to watch the video: https://vid.me/WaJr"

Oh, I let that domain expire a long time ago. It's dead.

My friend actually filed a patent for this exact system back in 2004, right down to the OLED visors: http://goo.gl/LfDDos

However, the cost of retaining a lawyer and the patent office's recurring fees and drawn out review process bled him dry. Just as he was getting close to finally registering it he fell on hard times and had to put the process on hold. As a result, his patent went into the public domain after 18 months. He was heartbroken and still is, especially now that this video is being shared everywhere.

As much as I love this idea and want to see it become a reality, I can't help but feel like this company got at least some of the details they needed from my friend's patent. It pisses me off that our copyright system screws over small inventors and gives those with plenty of money a free pool of research and hard work.

*return -- had to do some mussing with this to remove the embed code which was triggering a phishing error in Chrome (due to the mindcrap.com domain of the embed).

So, basically, she's not actually talking about how video games need to be more feminist oriented, but rather is more ranting about a website / domain called "Feminist Frequency" that is effectively a group of the college grade "MEN ARE EVIL PIGS" feminists, but hey grew up playing video games.

Actually not a bad read, although it drags in a few places.

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https://popcorntime.io/ is live and well and better interface than netflix.

I maintain that piracy is a service problem. Too many licensing and UI issues keep people from going legal. Movies should have an expiration of 15 years after which they should just go into public domain online - would solve a lot of problems, and still give movie companies 90 % of the money they get now without all the extra work.

Believe it or not, we are somehow able to have 100% confidence that there is no malicious content in our own JS code written for us by us, used on our own website, hosted on our own server, and linked via our own domain.

Go figure!

When I first started volunteering to serve at a homeless shelter, many years ago, I didn't know exactly why I was doing it. Certainly it felt like the "right" thing to do. I was at least confident that I wasn't doing it for personal gain because I didn't wear it on my sleave, didn't brag about it or hang my ego on my personal identity of being a good person. When dissillusionment set in, when I realized just how many of the people I was serving were homeless by choice, I pushed through and carried on...and I still didn't know why. I just trusted that I would get it one day.

Eventually I made a connection to the time I spent living in Sweden. In the town I lived in, every night a group of vagrants assembled in the market square. Every bit as dirty and drunken as the worst homeless person that most people imagine them all to be. Fighting, having sex in the public restroom, vomiting and carrying on loudly all night. But this was socialism, so they went home every night to their government payed for apartments. I realized that no matter what you do, there will always be a segment of society that just doesn't give a Fuck and is happy to take and never give back. We've all known these people. Family members, friends, acquaintances, who use up the good will of everyone they meet until they've got no one left to use and it falls to the larger community to support them. No economy, government or community planning will ever compell them to support themselves. We loathe them and shun them. Politicians with ulterior motives tell us that ALL homeless and disadvantaged ARE them. But it's a lie. There are the mentally and physically ill who have no support structure, who NEED their communities to help them. Most of these people were once functioning members of their communities who no longer have the ability to survive on their own.
And so I came to understand that it's better to feed a hundred leaches to serve a single helpless individual.

Boy was I proud of myself for realizing that.

And then I was layed off and my job shipped to India, followed closely by my wife spending a year in and out of the hospital, with no insurance. A careers worth of hard work, reduced to a data point on a corporate profit sheet. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, when the medical debt comes for me and everything I've built in my life is taken, to become a line in someone else's ledger. Betrayed by the greed in the system. Because I upheld my end of the social contract. I worked hard in school, excelled in my career, had two kids and bought a house in a neighborhood with good schools. But the system is run by the greediest and most power hungry. Politics and business is the domain of the high functioning sociopath. And to a sociopath, you're not a real person like them. You're a data point, a line in the ledger.

Then I came to respect the other segment of the homeless. The ones who rejected the social contract, who don't feel societal pressure to give more than they take. Because they got it right. It's all a lie. You don't earn anything in America. You don't deserve the fruits of your labor. You subsist at the whim of the people with money and power. And when it serves them, you get nothing.

We are all standing in line for food, hoping there's a room for the night.