"It is currently voluntary. A lot of people are pushing for it to be mandatory, which would practically chop Google's business plan off at the hips."
No, they aren't. They aren't trying to make anything "mandatory". What they're pushing for, is to make it all opt-in only.
People will still have a choice. They only difference is, it will be truly voluntary, as opposed to the way it is now, which is not so much voluntary but sneaky.
YOU, and other Slashdotters, may be aware of how much you are tracked, but believe me, the vast majority of people do not.
There is no rational reason why the death penalty should cost more than life in prison. They should not even be in the same ballpark. The fact that the costs have been reversed is tribute to how thoroughly the lawyers have f*ked up our legal system.
I concede that the death penalty should not be used as a leverage to get people to plea bargain, especially if they are innocent. But then, I think plea bargaining should be illegal anyway. It's bullshit. Charge someone with a crime, prosecute them for THAT crime. Period. End of story. If you can't prove they are guilty, they walk. Period. End of story.
That's the basis our legal system was built on. And arguably, it worked better then.
I would disagree with you, *IF* our "criminal justice system" were less fraught with errors and bureaucracy. The death penalty is in fact a viable -- I would even say humane -- method of removing certain cancers from society. Not as a punishment or "deterrent", but rather just a way of removing an intractable problem once and for all.
But since our system *IS* so full of errors -- just look at the number of convictions that have been overturned due to faulty "incontrovertible" DNA evidence -- I cannot condone it at this time. Not because I think there is anything wrong with death in certain special cases, but because I believe we should be very damned sure of guilt before it is done.
" There's been talk for years of raising it to 18."
They talked about doing that here, too. They also did try some "restricted privileges" between 16 and 18.
Big mistake. The State needs to decide on an age that is "adult", and stick with it. Instead, they have been pushing these namby-pamby rules about "old enough to decide this for yourself, but not that".
It's all bullshit. Set an age, have done with it. We don't need all those lawyers. Really.
I was going to say something similar. While there is definitely a gray area in the middle, I don't think they are the same things. I would call this a lot more "distraction" than "multitasking".
Correction: I stated, incorrectly, that purchasing power and price levels were the same things. Actually, the first chart is price levels. Purchasing power (worth) is shown in the second chart.
"Same thing for USA. Since 1971, when Nixon defaulted on the dollar, the economy has been going down. If you take all sorts of graphs, that compare wealth distribution, compare wages, salaries, purchasing power, manufacturing, government spending, whatever you want, you'll see an interesting thing that happened since about 1971 - there is an edge there, and all these charts show that since then the disparity started growing, the real earning power started going down, the debt started growing much more than before, inflation really took off, all the bad things that eventually do destroy the economy started around that moment."
There is no need to get that fancy. A single number, the purchasing power of the dollar (price levels), is sufficient to illustrate your point. Alternatively, you can simply flip the graph over vertically, which shows the worth of the dollar over the same time period. Nobody ever shows it that way, though, because it's far too scary. The latter is the very same graph, just showing the opposite side of the same coin, as it were.
"Or, force PayPal to not do currency conversions. In the end, they will either have to give up, massively devalue the Peso or make it a non-convertablke currency."
Or -- far simpler -- just do as they did in the EU and make PayPal register as an actual bank.
"... with nary a peep from people, or indeed economists who should know better. "
Indeed, economists should know better. But as long as government and Wall Street insist that they must continue to spout discredited but self-serving Keynesian principles, things aren't going to get any better.
"It's the government of Argentina that is "gaming the system" by artificially increasing the price of dollars. Smart people are realizing that socialist policies are going to bring high inflation as they always do and wipe away people's life savings in the name of social justice."
Why are you telling us? If you really think it will make a difference, say it to Obama. And Congress, of course.
"I'd like to see the abuse of the word piracy eradicated as much as you do. Well, maybe not as much, but we're on the same side is all I'm saying"
Well, my apologies then. I'm not trying to be contrary, but I thought you were.
"That is comparable with saying that 'wielding a knife' includes 'stabbing somebody to death' (or, if the magnitude bothers you: 'slicing off your fingertip')."
Terminology. What I was saying that however you want to put it, typical downloading *is* P2P. And it *is* filesharing. Though those things also include far more than just uploading or downloading copyrighted works, admittedly. Still, none of them -- hardly ever, anyway -- include piracy.
"No, nothing can go faster than the speed of light because it will violate causality. Which is more or less forbidden by the entirety of physics."
Incorrect. There is nothing we know of that actually works to prevent the violation of causality. There are a number of ways it can theoretically be done.
See Tipler, "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation".
All rhetoric (like the post at that link) aside, all we really have about it is guesses. The fact that we have never observed anything, so far, that would violate causality says absolutely nothing about the possibility.
Further, it is not necessarily true that limited instances of causality violation would render the entirety of physics invalid, any more than relativistic situations render Newton "invalid". They are "special cases". That is all.
"... we can see it in certain configurations of regular matter, such as the Casimir effect."
What does the Casimir effect have to do with it? That is merely a demonstration of so-called "zero point" fluctuations. It isn't "negative energy", except to the extent that you have particles and their counter-particles spontaneously arising at the same time. Even so, in the case of the Casimir effect it exerts a net positive energy on the affected mass.
"Exotic matter, by definition, requires violations of the known laws of physics."
No, it doesn't. Antimatter is one valid type of "exotic matter", and it has been manufactured in labs in various (small) amounts for many decades now, without a physics violation in sight.
Further, there is nothing theoretically preventing us from manufacturing it in fairly large quantities, as long as it can be kept in magnetic containment.
"Reporters and editors who work at the NY Times corporation express their own opinions all the time."
Talk about straw-man! It should have been pretty clear to you that this is not the kind of activity to which I was referring.
"Still, that's not the point at all. People who work for a corporation are employed to do their job. Sometimes that job involves expressing their opinions and sometimes that job requires NOT expressing their opinions."
Yes, it *IS* the point. You are in fact illustrating its presence yourself: the opinions of THE PEOPLE can be (and often are) different from the "opinions" expressed by "corporate speech". Far from refuting me, you have acknowledged and proven my point.
"Campaign finance" laws are generally about one thing, doing what Congress thinks will help keep them in office and give them more control and an advantage in elections. That's not necessarily why regular people push them, but that's why Congress and President's pass them.
Well, no shit, Sherlock. But that's completely beside the point. I was talking about the "what", not about the "why" it has been allowed.
"Be that as it may, I'd wager that 90% of even semiliterate users have come to understand 'piracy' in this context as copyright infringement. This is what I meant by 'generally accepted term'. "
Generally accepted or not, it's just plain wrong. Piracy has a specific legal meaning, and Big Content has waged a purposeful campaign to get you to conflate it with downloading, even though they ARE two very different things.
So "generally accepted" or not, why are you doing their work for them?
"P2P, filesharing and downloading do not mean "downloading/uploading content to which one does not own the rights to possess or redistribute". So no, they are not alternatives. Far from being such, actually."
No, they do not "mean" that, per se, but they do include it. P2P and filesharing ARE acceptable (and correct) terms to use for "downloading/uploading content to which one does not own the rights to possess or redistribute", if that is indeed what you are doing. You are splitting hairs here, and IMO not justifiably.
"No. If they are offering direct downloads, and making money off ads in the process, then they are pirates."
I should qualify this. If they are intentionally offering direct downloads of illegally copied works in exchange for a profit, they are pirates. But "locker" sites, like MegaUpload, are a gray area. They have to be aware that they are offering copyright infringing content in order to be in violation of the law. *BUT* -- if outside users upload all that content, it's pretty hard to pin the blame on the site owner, particularly in light of Federal law explicitly stating that a service provider cannot be held liable for user uploads.
"So when a site offers a bunch of copyrighted movies for you to download for free so they can make money off ads... They aren't pirates, even though they are distributing copies for a profit, just because downloading is involved?"
No. If they are offering direct downloads, and making money off ads in the process, then they are pirates.
But direct downloading is not P2P or BitTorrent. It is a completely different thing.
Downloading via BitTorrent or other P2P protocol is almost always NOT pirating. Nor is uploading. Pirates don't give their stuff away.
"As stated by the USSC decision, they're (among other things) associations of citizens."
You still don't get it (and I am about to give up trying to explain; you seem a bit thick-headed in this respect).
In reality, it's false. Opinions or political speech expressed BY a corporation have no relationship to the opinions of the people who WORK FOR (make up) that corporation. And don't give me that crap about it expressing the opinions of stockholders rather than the workers. It's still beside the point. It still constitutes a SEPARATE ENTITY -- separate from the people -- who make up that corporation. So it's an EXTRA entity, over and above the actual people, who still have their own rights of speech anyway.
You can't base it on the rights of the people, because it's EXTRA to those people. Those people still retain their original rights. You are making up an EXTRA entity ("extra" in both senses of "in addition" and "outside") that did not exist before.
And if you don't get that point by now, you never will. I have explained it a couple of different ways now, and if you still don't understand I have no reason to continue this exchange.
"... but as my first sentence shows, 'piracy' is a much more convenient generally accepted term for the behaviour we're discussing"
I beg do differ. I know that we are basically on the same side regarding the legality, but "piracy" is NOT a general term. It was deliberately introduced into the vernacular to get people to think it was.
"Piracy" is a legal term. It was first used in the context of copyright around 100 years or so ago, maybe a bit more. But since then it has become embodied in actual law. Piracy is defined by federal statute to be as I described. So no, it is not a general term. It is a specific legal term, and if you use it as a general term for downloading, I say again: you are doing the RIAA and MPAA's jobs (in regard to PR) for them.
We ALREADY have alternatives!!! Not just one, but several: "downloading" is one but pretty vague. But there there are "P2P" and "filesharing", both of which are antithesis -- antagonistic -- to actual "piracy". Take your pick.
Slashdot Mirror
"It is currently voluntary. A lot of people are pushing for it to be mandatory, which would practically chop Google's business plan off at the hips."
No, they aren't. They aren't trying to make anything "mandatory". What they're pushing for, is to make it all opt-in only.
People will still have a choice. They only difference is, it will be truly voluntary, as opposed to the way it is now, which is not so much voluntary but sneaky.
YOU, and other Slashdotters, may be aware of how much you are tracked, but believe me, the vast majority of people do not.
By that standard, a very large percentage of the world is deranged. I'm not so sure your argument is valid.
There is no rational reason why the death penalty should cost more than life in prison. They should not even be in the same ballpark. The fact that the costs have been reversed is tribute to how thoroughly the lawyers have f*ked up our legal system.
I concede that the death penalty should not be used as a leverage to get people to plea bargain, especially if they are innocent. But then, I think plea bargaining should be illegal anyway. It's bullshit. Charge someone with a crime, prosecute them for THAT crime. Period. End of story. If you can't prove they are guilty, they walk. Period. End of story.
That's the basis our legal system was built on. And arguably, it worked better then.
"Civilized people don't have the death penalty."
I would disagree with you, *IF* our "criminal justice system" were less fraught with errors and bureaucracy. The death penalty is in fact a viable -- I would even say humane -- method of removing certain cancers from society. Not as a punishment or "deterrent", but rather just a way of removing an intractable problem once and for all.
But since our system *IS* so full of errors -- just look at the number of convictions that have been overturned due to faulty "incontrovertible" DNA evidence -- I cannot condone it at this time. Not because I think there is anything wrong with death in certain special cases, but because I believe we should be very damned sure of guilt before it is done.
I have not looked at the details, but I know COSTCO carries some nice hearing aids with Bluetooth capability.
The newer version of Bluetooth uses far less power than older versions. It should be suitable for hearing aid use.
" There's been talk for years of raising it to 18."
They talked about doing that here, too. They also did try some "restricted privileges" between 16 and 18.
Big mistake. The State needs to decide on an age that is "adult", and stick with it. Instead, they have been pushing these namby-pamby rules about "old enough to decide this for yourself, but not that".
It's all bullshit. Set an age, have done with it. We don't need all those lawyers. Really.
I was going to say something similar. While there is definitely a gray area in the middle, I don't think they are the same things. I would call this a lot more "distraction" than "multitasking".
"... now that there are some nice official media reports from third parties to lend some credence to the scam."
No... now that there are some nice official media reports that indicate that it's not a scam, but a potentially legit investment.
Correction: I stated, incorrectly, that purchasing power and price levels were the same things. Actually, the first chart is price levels. Purchasing power (worth) is shown in the second chart.
"Same thing for USA. Since 1971, when Nixon defaulted on the dollar, the economy has been going down. If you take all sorts of graphs, that compare wealth distribution, compare wages, salaries, purchasing power, manufacturing, government spending, whatever you want, you'll see an interesting thing that happened since about 1971 - there is an edge there, and all these charts show that since then the disparity started growing, the real earning power started going down, the debt started growing much more than before, inflation really took off, all the bad things that eventually do destroy the economy started around that moment."
There is no need to get that fancy. A single number, the purchasing power of the dollar (price levels), is sufficient to illustrate your point. Alternatively, you can simply flip the graph over vertically, which shows the worth of the dollar over the same time period. Nobody ever shows it that way, though, because it's far too scary. The latter is the very same graph, just showing the opposite side of the same coin, as it were.
"Or, force PayPal to not do currency conversions. In the end, they will either have to give up, massively devalue the Peso or make it a non-convertablke currency."
Or -- far simpler -- just do as they did in the EU and make PayPal register as an actual bank.
"... with nary a peep from people, or indeed economists who should know better. "
Indeed, economists should know better. But as long as government and Wall Street insist that they must continue to spout discredited but self-serving Keynesian principles, things aren't going to get any better.
"It's the government of Argentina that is "gaming the system" by artificially increasing the price of dollars. Smart people are realizing that socialist policies are going to bring high inflation as they always do and wipe away people's life savings in the name of social justice ."
Why are you telling us? If you really think it will make a difference, say it to Obama. And Congress, of course.
"I'd like to see the abuse of the word piracy eradicated as much as you do. Well, maybe not as much, but we're on the same side is all I'm saying"
Well, my apologies then. I'm not trying to be contrary, but I thought you were.
"That is comparable with saying that 'wielding a knife' includes 'stabbing somebody to death' (or, if the magnitude bothers you: 'slicing off your fingertip')."
Terminology. What I was saying that however you want to put it, typical downloading *is* P2P. And it *is* filesharing. Though those things also include far more than just uploading or downloading copyrighted works, admittedly. Still, none of them -- hardly ever, anyway -- include piracy.
"No, nothing can go faster than the speed of light because it will violate causality. Which is more or less forbidden by the entirety of physics."
Incorrect. There is nothing we know of that actually works to prevent the violation of causality. There are a number of ways it can theoretically be done.
See Tipler, "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation".
All rhetoric (like the post at that link) aside, all we really have about it is guesses. The fact that we have never observed anything, so far, that would violate causality says absolutely nothing about the possibility. Further, it is not necessarily true that limited instances of causality violation would render the entirety of physics invalid, any more than relativistic situations render Newton "invalid". They are "special cases". That is all.
"In fact, I propose that anti-matter has negative mass, not opposite charge as generally accepted."
That might have been a viable theory half a century ago or more. But antimatter has been observed to have positive mass.
"... we can see it in certain configurations of regular matter, such as the Casimir effect."
What does the Casimir effect have to do with it? That is merely a demonstration of so-called "zero point" fluctuations. It isn't "negative energy", except to the extent that you have particles and their counter-particles spontaneously arising at the same time. Even so, in the case of the Casimir effect it exerts a net positive energy on the affected mass.
"Exotic matter, by definition, requires violations of the known laws of physics."
No, it doesn't. Antimatter is one valid type of "exotic matter", and it has been manufactured in labs in various (small) amounts for many decades now, without a physics violation in sight.
Further, there is nothing theoretically preventing us from manufacturing it in fairly large quantities, as long as it can be kept in magnetic containment.
"Reporters and editors who work at the NY Times corporation express their own opinions all the time."
Talk about straw-man! It should have been pretty clear to you that this is not the kind of activity to which I was referring.
"Still, that's not the point at all. People who work for a corporation are employed to do their job. Sometimes that job involves expressing their opinions and sometimes that job requires NOT expressing their opinions."
Yes, it *IS* the point. You are in fact illustrating its presence yourself: the opinions of THE PEOPLE can be (and often are) different from the "opinions" expressed by "corporate speech". Far from refuting me, you have acknowledged and proven my point.
"Campaign finance" laws are generally about one thing, doing what Congress thinks will help keep them in office and give them more control and an advantage in elections. That's not necessarily why regular people push them, but that's why Congress and President's pass them.
Well, no shit, Sherlock. But that's completely beside the point. I was talking about the "what", not about the "why" it has been allowed.
"Be that as it may, I'd wager that 90% of even semiliterate users have come to understand 'piracy' in this context as copyright infringement. This is what I meant by 'generally accepted term'. "
Generally accepted or not, it's just plain wrong. Piracy has a specific legal meaning, and Big Content has waged a purposeful campaign to get you to conflate it with downloading, even though they ARE two very different things.
So "generally accepted" or not, why are you doing their work for them?
"P2P, filesharing and downloading do not mean "downloading/uploading content to which one does not own the rights to possess or redistribute". So no, they are not alternatives. Far from being such, actually."
No, they do not "mean" that, per se, but they do include it. P2P and filesharing ARE acceptable (and correct) terms to use for "downloading/uploading content to which one does not own the rights to possess or redistribute", if that is indeed what you are doing. You are splitting hairs here, and IMO not justifiably.
And it's probably about half as stealthy... or less.
See how those thrusters jut right out the back? That's not stealth. The rest of it might be, sort of.
"No. If they are offering direct downloads, and making money off ads in the process, then they are pirates."
I should qualify this. If they are intentionally offering direct downloads of illegally copied works in exchange for a profit, they are pirates. But "locker" sites, like MegaUpload, are a gray area. They have to be aware that they are offering copyright infringing content in order to be in violation of the law. *BUT* -- if outside users upload all that content, it's pretty hard to pin the blame on the site owner, particularly in light of Federal law explicitly stating that a service provider cannot be held liable for user uploads.
"So when a site offers a bunch of copyrighted movies for you to download for free so they can make money off ads... They aren't pirates, even though they are distributing copies for a profit, just because downloading is involved?"
No. If they are offering direct downloads, and making money off ads in the process, then they are pirates.
But direct downloading is not P2P or BitTorrent. It is a completely different thing.
Downloading via BitTorrent or other P2P protocol is almost always NOT pirating. Nor is uploading. Pirates don't give their stuff away.
"As stated by the USSC decision, they're (among other things) associations of citizens."
You still don't get it (and I am about to give up trying to explain; you seem a bit thick-headed in this respect).
In reality, it's false. Opinions or political speech expressed BY a corporation have no relationship to the opinions of the people who WORK FOR (make up) that corporation. And don't give me that crap about it expressing the opinions of stockholders rather than the workers. It's still beside the point. It still constitutes a SEPARATE ENTITY -- separate from the people -- who make up that corporation. So it's an EXTRA entity, over and above the actual people, who still have their own rights of speech anyway.
You can't base it on the rights of the people, because it's EXTRA to those people. Those people still retain their original rights. You are making up an EXTRA entity ("extra" in both senses of "in addition" and "outside") that did not exist before.
And if you don't get that point by now, you never will. I have explained it a couple of different ways now, and if you still don't understand I have no reason to continue this exchange.
"... but as my first sentence shows, 'piracy' is a much more convenient generally accepted term for the behaviour we're discussing"
I beg do differ. I know that we are basically on the same side regarding the legality, but "piracy" is NOT a general term. It was deliberately introduced into the vernacular to get people to think it was.
"Piracy" is a legal term. It was first used in the context of copyright around 100 years or so ago, maybe a bit more. But since then it has become embodied in actual law. Piracy is defined by federal statute to be as I described. So no, it is not a general term. It is a specific legal term, and if you use it as a general term for downloading, I say again: you are doing the RIAA and MPAA's jobs (in regard to PR) for them.
We ALREADY have alternatives!!! Not just one, but several: "downloading" is one but pretty vague. But there there are "P2P" and "filesharing", both of which are antithesis -- antagonistic -- to actual "piracy". Take your pick.