Yeah, Obama already said that, basically, we're going to have one or two years of deficit spending, although hopefully not too much.
I was slightly disappointed too, but this is the way it always is: The Republicans break the budget and the Democrats have to spend the first few years in office fixing it.
Instead of throwing money at healthcare, figure out why health care is expensive.
Health care is expensive because we've invented an industry that makes more money the less health care is provided, put it between people and health care, and let it get large enough that it can dictate terms to the health care industry.
It's not fucking, ha ha, rocket science. The reason health care is broken in this country is the health insurance industry, period.
I mean, can imagine the shape grocery stores would be in if we all had 'grocery insurance' that dictated where and how we got food, and made more money the cheaper the food it let us buy? And were large enough to threaten to take 60% of the customers away from any grocery store that didn't participate?
Half the damn country would be rummaging through garbage cans for food.
Now, I'm a progressive, and I want national health 'insurance', although I'd really like it if we just stopped all the stupidity of 'insurance' and just provided everything for free, which would be cheaper than keeping track of it. People aren't running around getting unneeded medical care.
However, we'd do about as well by simply abolishing health insurance and actually allow health care customers to purchase health care.
Pure research is not a bad thing to have some of, but there are unique problems in space we're spending a lot of money overcoming, and it seems like we should actually maybe spend some of that money overcoming problems on earth.
It's all well and good to learn how to turn urine into drinkable water, but instead let's try to figure out how to turn toxic water into drinkable water, a slightly more relevant concept.
Yes, but those people have the ability to be hurt, in a much much much larger way, at random by the book publisher, who can print ten times as many copies as currently exist.
People don't have the 'right' to have their copies of out-of-print books be expensive. It is an artificial scarcity which can completely and instantly be destroyed by the actions of a single company on a whim.
And, in fact, their actions of purchasing the book make it slightly more likely there will be another printing thus totally destroying their 'investment'.
Slightly more relevantly, this is a moot point, as very few books actually increase in price because they are out of print. They get incredibly hard to find, but still generally sell for less then their price when new.
Normal out-of-print books do not have a demand/supply imbalance...when they were in print, approximately the correct amount got printed in total. Unless the demand shot up (And they were never brought back into print for some reason), it is extremely unlikely they'd be valued more than they were originally. (Certain versions of the printing might get valued more, like first editions or limited collector runs, but that's not the same thing, and there's no way a ebook could reduce the value of one of those.)
You are under a total delusion if you think the constitution does not allow the people to select representatives that will provide a security net. That is the definition of the 'promote the general welfare'.
I want all you loons who think it means something else to state exactly what that would be.
And if they state that said power is only those things explicitly listed in the constitution, well, I used to point out that view was shot down almost immediate by the Founding Fathers when they set up the first national bank, which was immediately challenged under the theory the government couldn't do that, and all the founding fathers said that, yes, it can, as it promotes the general welfare. (1)
But now I just ask them where the US government has the authority to operate an air force, something not mentioned in constitution either. Because if the 'promote the general welfare' is limited by the list following in section 8, so is 'provide for the common defence'.
Now, granted, there's no definition of the 'army' which Congress can create, so in theory you can include them in that. Which, in fact, they are.
But....then you hit the snag that Congress has the authority 'To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;', of which the air force is clearly neither. They could do whatever the hell they wanted, and Congress couldn't regulate them.
So unless Congress has the authority to provide for the common defence in general, it cannot issue rules and regulations about any air forces. (And without any regulations, of course, there's not even a chain of command, so forget any 'command and chief' workarounds of the president ordering the air force to follow regulations.)
And if it can provide for the common defence in general, outside of any explicitly listed power, it can also promote the common welfare outside of any explicitly listed power.
I await all you glibertarian loons calling for the abolishment of the air force. Or that people in the air force can do whatever they want completely unregulated.
1) And they went on to claim that, in fact, the most important word in 'general welfare' is general, in that things done with tax money must benefit society at large and not just a few people or individuals. And that is the point of that clause, as they just assumed that everyone knew the government could spend money on whatever it wanted, and they were limiting that to only spending money on things that helped everyone and not just a few. (This view, incidentally, might make bailouts or even unemployment unconstitutional, but it wouldn't make health care. It would also incidentally shoot down most earmarks, which are explicitly designed to funnel tax money somewhere.)
But a lot of people fixate on constitutional clauses from the wrong direction. There are a lot of assumptions in the constitution about how governments work that never actually get explicitly stated, like the infamous example of 'habeus corpus' which isn't actually listed at all.
Um you are aware that what killed Rome was not 'bread and circuses', but the fact they let their military and military leaders take over the operation of their government, relying solely on conquest instead of actual taxes?
Exactly. The point is the reduce the amount of sick fucks with a grudge against us.
The best way to do that is to keep our military 5000 miles away from them!
Yeah, the leaders of terrorist groups will be able to point at our culture and whatever and moan about the Great Satan, but the vast majority of people don't give a flying fuck if people on the other side of the world watch porn, and certainly aren't going to give their lives to blow them up.
I mean, there are plenty of horrible practices going on in the world, I don't approve of, but I'm extremely unlikely to strap explosives to myself, infiltrate China, and blow up civilians in an attempt to terrorize the government into freeing Tibet.
No, actual 'terrorist fighters', 99% of the time, have some personal grudge against the US because the US personally harmed them in some manner. The 'occupying holy lands' or whatever is an excuse...the US detained their cousin, or shot their sister, or, hell, just wanders up and down their street, heavily armed, although they haven't killed anyone yet.
Or, just as likely, we supported people and groups that did that, or worse.
99% of the terrorists out there wouldn't be terrorists if we'd never gotten anywhere near them. (At least, they wouldn't be terrorists against us.)
Granted, we'd still have to deal with home-grown terrorists, but whatever. For some reason everyone forgets about them, although once you exclude the extreme outlier of the incredibly 'lucky' 9/11 attacks, domestic terrorists have killed way more Americans.
A fact ignored by the media is that when Bush cut taxes, revenue actually rose.
You. Are. A. Lying. Fucktard.
See here. Note that tax revenue under Bush has barely caught up to where they belong in 2007, and that's probably because of a few tax breaks expiring.
And, of course, considering the theory is that 'lowering taxes causes more economic activity', the fact we just hit a recession is, you know, rather a disproof of that theory.
(I love linking to the Heritage Foundation to disproof right-wing loons.)
Defense spending has decreased as a percentage of discretionary spending every year for the past 42 years, while entitlement programs have ballooned to make up the vast majority of the federal budget.
Defense spending is currently 52.6% of discretionary spending according to that chart you just linked to. So you're arguing that it used to be...what? 100%?
I also don't know why you're talking about discretionary spending at the start of your sentence, and ending it talking about entitlement programs, which are, by definition, not discretionary.
And, incidentally, I don't know why the hell people keep using the OBM's figures. The OMBs budget figured don't include the wars we are fighting. Iraq added $133.2 billion in 2007, Afghanistan added $36.8 billion. Total military budget in 2007 was $699 billion.
There is one area that NASA is working on that no one else is, and it is their rover stuff.
Namely, they're building we-know-we-can't-repair-this control system, designed to operate without any outside input for several minutes. (Thanks to the speed of light.)
However, it is actually somewhat hard to think of any practical uses of this at the moment. Most UAVs on earth are directly controlled by human beings, and it doesn't cost several millions of dollars in launch costs when a radio controller fails. (And, heck, most of the time we can recover the damn thing and just fix it.) And they won't get caught on rock and drain their batteries trying to move for the next ten minutes because their AI isn't smart enough to figure something is wrong...the human operater will immediately see something is wrong and stop.
That's not to say the research is meaningless...many of the current UAV stuff was started by them, but at this point, military and rescue UAVs are solving the actual problems we face, and the NASA rovers are facing unique distance, energy, expense, and weight problems that aren't that relevant on earth where we can haul a UAV in on the back of a truck and if it breaks, we throw a backup in there, fix the problem with that, and later yank it out and repair.
There's a valid claim in that purchasing a used book does benefit the publisher...it reduces the copies of used books out there, and makes it more likely they will sell a new one.
You may think that's rather indirect, but not really. They sold every single copy of their book out there exactly once. Any behavior that results in more copies of their book out there is beneficial to them, and someone buying a used copy means someone else didn't buy that used copy and might buy a new copy. (Or might buy a different used copy, which might result in someone else buying a new one, and so on...)
In the end, every copy of a used book you buy, or even every copy of a new book you bought and then didn't resell, is, statistically, about 4/5ths of a new book sale eventually made somewhere out there when someone would have purchased that copy and instead purchased another one. Losing only the 1/5th extra when people bought a different book instead, because that one wasn't handy or they never even heard of it.
Of course, none of this applies if the work is out of print. I have no moral qualms about making any amount of copies of out-of-print works I want. I can't possibly increase their sales by buying used copies if they aren't selling it. All I'm going to do it make it harder for other people to get a hold of it.
No, I don't care that demand for an out-of-print product could, in theory, cause it to come back in print. It is not my fucking job to fix the stupidity of companies not having actually popular books in print.
You don't need a safety deposit box for that. Keep the file on your computer. (And, of course, back it up, just like everything else.) Put the password in your will.
Or, rather, attached to your will, like bank account numbers are. Because, as others have pointed out, your actual will is made public. Whereas instructions to the executor on how to access your assets do not have to be.
Killing cleanly is a skill that used to be fairly common and could be again, its hypocritical to eat meat if you couldn't bring yourself to kill it in the first place.
Yeah, people have apparently forgotten that 150 years ago, something like half the population of the western world slaughtered their own animals, and the rest, the people living in cities, went to a local butchers that had no pretense about where the meat was coming from and you got it straight off the animal.
...and, at the same time, PETA is killing a bunch of dogs it 'rescues' from animal shelters. Placing none of them in homes.
This is because it disapproves of pet ownership. So it thinks pets are better off dead. So it collects animals from unknowing animal shelters and kills them.
Oh, and it thinks we should 'liberate' cows. Despite the fact that cows can't survive in the wild. They'd all die giving birth. So it, essentially, wishes every cow dead, which fits nicely with it wishing every dog and cat running feral so we have to shoot them. (Horses, at least, would be fine, although I have to question where the hell they'd all live.)
PETA is completely insane. Everyone should oppose them at every turn. It doesn't matter if you happen to agree with some point of theirs. Don't support them, don't give them money, don't help them in any manner whatsoever. They are fucking lunatics.
If you want to help animals out, write your representative and ask him to require more humane ways of slaughtering animals for food, and donate your money to the local animal shelter.
For copyright to exist, it required a minimal level of effort required to violate copyright, especially at the 'mass production' level.
That no longer exist. Ergo, copyright no longer works. I'm not saying that as a moral judgment, I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing, I'm not saying whether I like it or not, I have no idea what that will do to the production of creative works.
Copyright was always aimed more at commercial interests than anyone else, because for the longest time only commercial interests could copy things, or at least could copy them at a high enough quality to effect things, or a high enough volume.
And then came the internet, where commercial interests are not needed to copy music or TV or movies or books or anything. Perfectly. Forever. Copyright was never designed to stop anything like that.
'Copyright no longer works' is just a value-neutral statement of fact. I did not make this true, do not blame me.
Now, the music's industry thrashing around attempting to face this fact could, indeed, cause damage, and thus I'm in favor of altering the laws to recognize this new fact and limit the damage they can do. Not because I feel this new fact is 'morally superior' or anything, but because I feel it is true.
Exactly. You need to police the network and somehow magically tell the difference between someone downloading a torrent of the newest Need for Speed vs. Ubuntu. Good luck with that.
When you manage a network, you assign priority. At a university, lab HTTP traffic beats out dorm HTTP, and both beat out torrents, and during the day the labs might have a dedicated bandwidth the dorms can't use regardless if the labs are using it, but at night that's turned off...
Meanwhile, you don't give a damn about what's being shared on the dorm's internal network unless someone's piping high-resolution video from one room to another constantly and swamping the network.
It sounds more complicated, but in actuality managing a network is much much easier than policing it.
In fact, the part you actually do have to police or they'll swamp the network, the owned-virus-spamming computers, is probably a bigger hassle than everything else combined.
You can also be charged with a crime if they do not have a driver's license, or do not have insurance.
In other words, you can be charged if you gave them the keys and legally they should not be driving at all, either because they are drunk or do not have the right to drive at all, if it can be demonstrated you knew that. And sometimes not even that, some states there is a presumption you will check their license before loaning them your car.
However, yes, you can't be charged with anything if, legally, they are allowed to drive, and they drive criminally once they get the car.
Well, duh. In fact, airplane security could simply be done by locking the cockpit door and refusing to negotiate with hijackers.
We don't even actually need to screen for bombs. Taking down a plane is high profile, but any idiot can find that many people in the same place that has no screening at all, like a crowded subway station. (Or the fucking security line at the airport. How's that for irony.) Protecting airplanes is like spending billions on developing bulletproof gloves because someone high profile got shot in the hand and bleed to death.
However, this requires some sort of rational thought instead of irrationally leaping to protect airplanes. I was just saying, if we were going to behave irrationally by spending billions airplane security, we should spend it on things that would actually secure planes, instead of trying to keep off 'knifes', aka, anything with a sharp edge, and 'binary explosives', aka, things that are a billion times more complicated than normal explosives which could be smuggled on planes.
I would compare this to the slightly less common, and more substantiated, fear of wasps and bees. People will become very, very nervous around wasps and bees, jumping up from their seats, running away, or trying to kill the creature. But the reality is that these creatures will rarely sting unless you disturb them or their nest(at least in europe).
Except for goddamn yellow jackets. Oh, sure, they'll only sting you if you disturb the nest...but they hide the damn nests underground so you can easily walk on them.
I've already thought we should have two marshals. One up at the front where everyone can see him, one unknown in a seat somewhere.
But, anyway, the point isn't what technology we use to keep their guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them.
The point is that for the great deal of money we spent creating miles of security lines and expensive machines and poorly trained screeners, we could have just hired armed people to go on the planes.
And put damn bomb sniffers that people had to walk through, instead of attempting to identify them by electronics, which is just fucking stupid.
I believe there is one guy who has a nice, taxi-looking car and a cell phone, and hangs out in downtown (Such as it is.) at night, who gets called to take drunk people home for a small fee. I'm pretty certain he has some sort of license, but who knows. I do know he's only on duty in the evenings, possibly only on weekends, and there's just that one guy and one car that is that company.
There's also a 'bus', actually a minivan, you can hire, but only in advance, which old ladies use to go grocery shopping.
If, for example, I'm in town, and my car breaks down, I literally have no options, no one to call that I can pay money to to get me home.
Besides, obviously, people I know who'll do it for free, but that's not actually my point. My point is that, hey, you think only having taxis is bad...try not having anything.
We don't have to put the lock on the gun. We could make some sort of trigger lock that has to be opened before the gun can fire. (Yes, yes, people could break that with enough time, but that requires having already overpowered the sky marshal.)
As for time, we can easily leave it on a dead-man's switch. Make the gun free to use, as long as it hasn't been removed from contact with the sky marshal. You can open the lock without a fingerprint if the lock has remained within a foot of an RFID worn on his waist or one worn on his wrist.
I don't know, but you can't tell me that for the amount of money that went into airport security, we couldn't develop a gun that was hard to snatch out of someone's hand and use immediately. (Preventing people from using it after ten minutes of work is another thing, and not worth it.)
Which would actually be useful in all sorts of places besides airplanes. Even if fairly expensive, it would be useful for bailiffs in court. If cheap, of course, we should start outfitting cops with it, but that's crazy future talk.
And, just as relevantly, you don't put the sky marshal out where people could wander by and grab his gun.
Yes, they can vote to expel a Senator for newly uncovered behavior. However, there is an interesting constitutional question whether or not they can expel people for known behaviors. In theory, the state of Alaska has the right to elect a felon, and Congress can't say 'You have failed in upholding the moral standard people hold you to', because clearly he hasn't failed, or wouldn't have been reelected. (Pretending for a second he was.)
You think Congress can do whatever it won't, but it can't. For example, it has tried in the past, and been shot down, attempting to impose term limits on itself. Congress only has the right to remove people who 'punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two thirds, expel a member.', and it's been determined that the second requires the first...they can only expel disorderly people.
If they had voted to expel Stevens for known behavior at the time he was elected, Stevens probably would have gone quietly...but he could have made a case that Alaska has the right to elect known felons if it wants, in the courts, just like it has the right to elect people who have exceed any Senate imposed 'term limits', and possibly won.
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Yeah, Obama already said that, basically, we're going to have one or two years of deficit spending, although hopefully not too much.
I was slightly disappointed too, but this is the way it always is: The Republicans break the budget and the Democrats have to spend the first few years in office fixing it.
Instead of throwing money at healthcare, figure out why health care is expensive.
Health care is expensive because we've invented an industry that makes more money the less health care is provided, put it between people and health care, and let it get large enough that it can dictate terms to the health care industry.
It's not fucking, ha ha, rocket science. The reason health care is broken in this country is the health insurance industry, period.
I mean, can imagine the shape grocery stores would be in if we all had 'grocery insurance' that dictated where and how we got food, and made more money the cheaper the food it let us buy? And were large enough to threaten to take 60% of the customers away from any grocery store that didn't participate?
Half the damn country would be rummaging through garbage cans for food.
Now, I'm a progressive, and I want national health 'insurance', although I'd really like it if we just stopped all the stupidity of 'insurance' and just provided everything for free, which would be cheaper than keeping track of it. People aren't running around getting unneeded medical care.
However, we'd do about as well by simply abolishing health insurance and actually allow health care customers to purchase health care.
NASA is staffed by drooling halfwits.
Sorry, but it's true.
Exactly.
Pure research is not a bad thing to have some of, but there are unique problems in space we're spending a lot of money overcoming, and it seems like we should actually maybe spend some of that money overcoming problems on earth.
It's all well and good to learn how to turn urine into drinkable water, but instead let's try to figure out how to turn toxic water into drinkable water, a slightly more relevant concept.
Yes, but those people have the ability to be hurt, in a much much much larger way, at random by the book publisher, who can print ten times as many copies as currently exist.
People don't have the 'right' to have their copies of out-of-print books be expensive. It is an artificial scarcity which can completely and instantly be destroyed by the actions of a single company on a whim.
And, in fact, their actions of purchasing the book make it slightly more likely there will be another printing thus totally destroying their 'investment'.
Slightly more relevantly, this is a moot point, as very few books actually increase in price because they are out of print. They get incredibly hard to find, but still generally sell for less then their price when new.
Normal out-of-print books do not have a demand/supply imbalance...when they were in print, approximately the correct amount got printed in total. Unless the demand shot up (And they were never brought back into print for some reason), it is extremely unlikely they'd be valued more than they were originally. (Certain versions of the printing might get valued more, like first editions or limited collector runs, but that's not the same thing, and there's no way a ebook could reduce the value of one of those.)
You are under a total delusion if you think the constitution does not allow the people to select representatives that will provide a security net. That is the definition of the 'promote the general welfare'.
I want all you loons who think it means something else to state exactly what that would be.
And if they state that said power is only those things explicitly listed in the constitution, well, I used to point out that view was shot down almost immediate by the Founding Fathers when they set up the first national bank, which was immediately challenged under the theory the government couldn't do that, and all the founding fathers said that, yes, it can, as it promotes the general welfare. (1)
But now I just ask them where the US government has the authority to operate an air force, something not mentioned in constitution either. Because if the 'promote the general welfare' is limited by the list following in section 8, so is 'provide for the common defence'.
Now, granted, there's no definition of the 'army' which Congress can create, so in theory you can include them in that. Which, in fact, they are.
But....then you hit the snag that Congress has the authority 'To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;', of which the air force is clearly neither. They could do whatever the hell they wanted, and Congress couldn't regulate them.
So unless Congress has the authority to provide for the common defence in general, it cannot issue rules and regulations about any air forces. (And without any regulations, of course, there's not even a chain of command, so forget any 'command and chief' workarounds of the president ordering the air force to follow regulations.)
And if it can provide for the common defence in general, outside of any explicitly listed power, it can also promote the common welfare outside of any explicitly listed power.
I await all you glibertarian loons calling for the abolishment of the air force. Or that people in the air force can do whatever they want completely unregulated.
1) And they went on to claim that, in fact, the most important word in 'general welfare' is general, in that things done with tax money must benefit society at large and not just a few people or individuals. And that is the point of that clause, as they just assumed that everyone knew the government could spend money on whatever it wanted, and they were limiting that to only spending money on things that helped everyone and not just a few. (This view, incidentally, might make bailouts or even unemployment unconstitutional, but it wouldn't make health care. It would also incidentally shoot down most earmarks, which are explicitly designed to funnel tax money somewhere.)
But a lot of people fixate on constitutional clauses from the wrong direction. There are a lot of assumptions in the constitution about how governments work that never actually get explicitly stated, like the infamous example of 'habeus corpus' which isn't actually listed at all.
Um you are aware that what killed Rome was not 'bread and circuses', but the fact they let their military and military leaders take over the operation of their government, relying solely on conquest instead of actual taxes?
Exactly. The point is the reduce the amount of sick fucks with a grudge against us.
The best way to do that is to keep our military 5000 miles away from them!
Yeah, the leaders of terrorist groups will be able to point at our culture and whatever and moan about the Great Satan, but the vast majority of people don't give a flying fuck if people on the other side of the world watch porn, and certainly aren't going to give their lives to blow them up.
I mean, there are plenty of horrible practices going on in the world, I don't approve of, but I'm extremely unlikely to strap explosives to myself, infiltrate China, and blow up civilians in an attempt to terrorize the government into freeing Tibet.
No, actual 'terrorist fighters', 99% of the time, have some personal grudge against the US because the US personally harmed them in some manner. The 'occupying holy lands' or whatever is an excuse...the US detained their cousin, or shot their sister, or, hell, just wanders up and down their street, heavily armed, although they haven't killed anyone yet.
Or, just as likely, we supported people and groups that did that, or worse.
99% of the terrorists out there wouldn't be terrorists if we'd never gotten anywhere near them. (At least, they wouldn't be terrorists against us.)
Granted, we'd still have to deal with home-grown terrorists, but whatever. For some reason everyone forgets about them, although once you exclude the extreme outlier of the incredibly 'lucky' 9/11 attacks, domestic terrorists have killed way more Americans.
A fact ignored by the media is that when Bush cut taxes, revenue actually rose.
You. Are. A. Lying. Fucktard.
See here. Note that tax revenue under Bush has barely caught up to where they belong in 2007, and that's probably because of a few tax breaks expiring.
And, of course, considering the theory is that 'lowering taxes causes more economic activity', the fact we just hit a recession is, you know, rather a disproof of that theory.
(I love linking to the Heritage Foundation to disproof right-wing loons.)
Defense spending has decreased as a percentage of discretionary spending every year for the past 42 years, while entitlement programs have ballooned to make up the vast majority of the federal budget.
Defense spending is currently 52.6% of discretionary spending according to that chart you just linked to. So you're arguing that it used to be...what? 100%?
I also don't know why you're talking about discretionary spending at the start of your sentence, and ending it talking about entitlement programs, which are, by definition, not discretionary.
And, incidentally, I don't know why the hell people keep using the OBM's figures. The OMBs budget figured don't include the wars we are fighting. Iraq added $133.2 billion in 2007, Afghanistan added $36.8 billion. Total military budget in 2007 was $699 billion.
There is one area that NASA is working on that no one else is, and it is their rover stuff.
Namely, they're building we-know-we-can't-repair-this control system, designed to operate without any outside input for several minutes. (Thanks to the speed of light.)
However, it is actually somewhat hard to think of any practical uses of this at the moment. Most UAVs on earth are directly controlled by human beings, and it doesn't cost several millions of dollars in launch costs when a radio controller fails. (And, heck, most of the time we can recover the damn thing and just fix it.) And they won't get caught on rock and drain their batteries trying to move for the next ten minutes because their AI isn't smart enough to figure something is wrong...the human operater will immediately see something is wrong and stop.
That's not to say the research is meaningless...many of the current UAV stuff was started by them, but at this point, military and rescue UAVs are solving the actual problems we face, and the NASA rovers are facing unique distance, energy, expense, and weight problems that aren't that relevant on earth where we can haul a UAV in on the back of a truck and if it breaks, we throw a backup in there, fix the problem with that, and later yank it out and repair.
There's a valid claim in that purchasing a used book does benefit the publisher...it reduces the copies of used books out there, and makes it more likely they will sell a new one.
You may think that's rather indirect, but not really. They sold every single copy of their book out there exactly once. Any behavior that results in more copies of their book out there is beneficial to them, and someone buying a used copy means someone else didn't buy that used copy and might buy a new copy. (Or might buy a different used copy, which might result in someone else buying a new one, and so on...)
In the end, every copy of a used book you buy, or even every copy of a new book you bought and then didn't resell, is, statistically, about 4/5ths of a new book sale eventually made somewhere out there when someone would have purchased that copy and instead purchased another one. Losing only the 1/5th extra when people bought a different book instead, because that one wasn't handy or they never even heard of it.
Of course, none of this applies if the work is out of print. I have no moral qualms about making any amount of copies of out-of-print works I want. I can't possibly increase their sales by buying used copies if they aren't selling it. All I'm going to do it make it harder for other people to get a hold of it.
No, I don't care that demand for an out-of-print product could, in theory, cause it to come back in print. It is not my fucking job to fix the stupidity of companies not having actually popular books in print.
You don't need a safety deposit box for that. Keep the file on your computer. (And, of course, back it up, just like everything else.) Put the password in your will.
Or, rather, attached to your will, like bank account numbers are. Because, as others have pointed out, your actual will is made public. Whereas instructions to the executor on how to access your assets do not have to be.
PETA is hypocrites.
What they don't tell you is that they don't believe in animal ownership at all. If PETA had their way we'd have to turn all our dogs wild.
Or we could just do what PETA does, and kill our dogs. 19,200 dogs, cats, puppies, and kittens.
Killing cleanly is a skill that used to be fairly common and could be again, its hypocritical to eat meat if you couldn't bring yourself to kill it in the first place.
Yeah, people have apparently forgotten that 150 years ago, something like half the population of the western world slaughtered their own animals, and the rest, the people living in cities, went to a local butchers that had no pretense about where the meat was coming from and you got it straight off the animal.
...and, at the same time, PETA is killing a bunch of dogs it 'rescues' from animal shelters. Placing none of them in homes.
This is because it disapproves of pet ownership. So it thinks pets are better off dead. So it collects animals from unknowing animal shelters and kills them.
Oh, and it thinks we should 'liberate' cows. Despite the fact that cows can't survive in the wild. They'd all die giving birth. So it, essentially, wishes every cow dead, which fits nicely with it wishing every dog and cat running feral so we have to shoot them. (Horses, at least, would be fine, although I have to question where the hell they'd all live.)
PETA is completely insane. Everyone should oppose them at every turn. It doesn't matter if you happen to agree with some point of theirs. Don't support them, don't give them money, don't help them in any manner whatsoever. They are fucking lunatics.
If you want to help animals out, write your representative and ask him to require more humane ways of slaughtering animals for food, and donate your money to the local animal shelter.
There isn't any music 'they can face'.
For copyright to exist, it required a minimal level of effort required to violate copyright, especially at the 'mass production' level.
That no longer exist. Ergo, copyright no longer works. I'm not saying that as a moral judgment, I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing, I'm not saying whether I like it or not, I have no idea what that will do to the production of creative works.
Copyright was always aimed more at commercial interests than anyone else, because for the longest time only commercial interests could copy things, or at least could copy them at a high enough quality to effect things, or a high enough volume.
And then came the internet, where commercial interests are not needed to copy music or TV or movies or books or anything. Perfectly. Forever. Copyright was never designed to stop anything like that.
'Copyright no longer works' is just a value-neutral statement of fact. I did not make this true, do not blame me.
Now, the music's industry thrashing around attempting to face this fact could, indeed, cause damage, and thus I'm in favor of altering the laws to recognize this new fact and limit the damage they can do. Not because I feel this new fact is 'morally superior' or anything, but because I feel it is true.
Exactly. You need to police the network and somehow magically tell the difference between someone downloading a torrent of the newest Need for Speed vs. Ubuntu. Good luck with that.
When you manage a network, you assign priority. At a university, lab HTTP traffic beats out dorm HTTP, and both beat out torrents, and during the day the labs might have a dedicated bandwidth the dorms can't use regardless if the labs are using it, but at night that's turned off...
Meanwhile, you don't give a damn about what's being shared on the dorm's internal network unless someone's piping high-resolution video from one room to another constantly and swamping the network.
It sounds more complicated, but in actuality managing a network is much much easier than policing it.
In fact, the part you actually do have to police or they'll swamp the network, the owned-virus-spamming computers, is probably a bigger hassle than everything else combined.
You can also be charged with a crime if they do not have a driver's license, or do not have insurance.
In other words, you can be charged if you gave them the keys and legally they should not be driving at all, either because they are drunk or do not have the right to drive at all, if it can be demonstrated you knew that. And sometimes not even that, some states there is a presumption you will check their license before loaning them your car.
However, yes, you can't be charged with anything if, legally, they are allowed to drive, and they drive criminally once they get the car.
Well, duh. In fact, airplane security could simply be done by locking the cockpit door and refusing to negotiate with hijackers.
We don't even actually need to screen for bombs. Taking down a plane is high profile, but any idiot can find that many people in the same place that has no screening at all, like a crowded subway station. (Or the fucking security line at the airport. How's that for irony.) Protecting airplanes is like spending billions on developing bulletproof gloves because someone high profile got shot in the hand and bleed to death.
However, this requires some sort of rational thought instead of irrationally leaping to protect airplanes. I was just saying, if we were going to behave irrationally by spending billions airplane security, we should spend it on things that would actually secure planes, instead of trying to keep off 'knifes', aka, anything with a sharp edge, and 'binary explosives', aka, things that are a billion times more complicated than normal explosives which could be smuggled on planes.
I would compare this to the slightly less common, and more substantiated, fear of wasps and bees. People will become very, very nervous around wasps and bees, jumping up from their seats, running away, or trying to kill the creature. But the reality is that these creatures will rarely sting unless you disturb them or their nest(at least in europe).
Except for goddamn yellow jackets. Oh, sure, they'll only sting you if you disturb the nest...but they hide the damn nests underground so you can easily walk on them.
I've already thought we should have two marshals. One up at the front where everyone can see him, one unknown in a seat somewhere.
But, anyway, the point isn't what technology we use to keep their guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them.
The point is that for the great deal of money we spent creating miles of security lines and expensive machines and poorly trained screeners, we could have just hired armed people to go on the planes.
And put damn bomb sniffers that people had to walk through, instead of attempting to identify them by electronics, which is just fucking stupid.
You're lucky.
My county and city doesn't even have taxis.
I believe there is one guy who has a nice, taxi-looking car and a cell phone, and hangs out in downtown (Such as it is.) at night, who gets called to take drunk people home for a small fee. I'm pretty certain he has some sort of license, but who knows. I do know he's only on duty in the evenings, possibly only on weekends, and there's just that one guy and one car that is that company.
There's also a 'bus', actually a minivan, you can hire, but only in advance, which old ladies use to go grocery shopping.
If, for example, I'm in town, and my car breaks down, I literally have no options, no one to call that I can pay money to to get me home.
Besides, obviously, people I know who'll do it for free, but that's not actually my point. My point is that, hey, you think only having taxis is bad...try not having anything.
We don't have to put the lock on the gun. We could make some sort of trigger lock that has to be opened before the gun can fire. (Yes, yes, people could break that with enough time, but that requires having already overpowered the sky marshal.)
As for time, we can easily leave it on a dead-man's switch. Make the gun free to use, as long as it hasn't been removed from contact with the sky marshal. You can open the lock without a fingerprint if the lock has remained within a foot of an RFID worn on his waist or one worn on his wrist.
I don't know, but you can't tell me that for the amount of money that went into airport security, we couldn't develop a gun that was hard to snatch out of someone's hand and use immediately. (Preventing people from using it after ten minutes of work is another thing, and not worth it.)
Which would actually be useful in all sorts of places besides airplanes. Even if fairly expensive, it would be useful for bailiffs in court. If cheap, of course, we should start outfitting cops with it, but that's crazy future talk.
And, just as relevantly, you don't put the sky marshal out where people could wander by and grab his gun.
Yes, they can vote to expel a Senator for newly uncovered behavior. However, there is an interesting constitutional question whether or not they can expel people for known behaviors. In theory, the state of Alaska has the right to elect a felon, and Congress can't say 'You have failed in upholding the moral standard people hold you to', because clearly he hasn't failed, or wouldn't have been reelected. (Pretending for a second he was.)
You think Congress can do whatever it won't, but it can't. For example, it has tried in the past, and been shot down, attempting to impose term limits on itself. Congress only has the right to remove people who 'punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two thirds, expel a member.', and it's been determined that the second requires the first...they can only expel disorderly people.
If they had voted to expel Stevens for known behavior at the time he was elected, Stevens probably would have gone quietly...but he could have made a case that Alaska has the right to elect known felons if it wants, in the courts, just like it has the right to elect people who have exceed any Senate imposed 'term limits', and possibly won.