Even if the pamplet said "you can't do X, Y or Z" with it. If the producer said "how dare you use it to make a hat, it says so on page 5" most people would probably laugh at them (they'd laugh even harder if you couldn't read the language it was written in.)
Right, they threw out such concepts 100 years. You cannot control of the use of a copyrighted work after you sell it, except to the extent you can bar people making copies. (And they automatically can't do that, so you're not really 'barring' them.)
Would it actually need new laws? Maybe this should be a job for existing copyright libraries
It logically shouldn't need new laws. I think a legal defense exists that says 'I could have done the same thing in a legal manner, but I did it in an illegal manner to cause less harm to someone.'. The fact you didn't use all their bandwidth to make yourself legal should be a good thing, and, in a sane legal system, that defense would work.
But I'd much better like a law specifically aimed at them. Libraries already have one sorta like that, but it only covers 'official' libraries, and it only applies to making copies of out of print books.
Which is not the same a requiring them to destroy their copies...
Ha, you caught that. Yeah, copyright laws applies to, of course, making copies, which archive sites do. It can't make someone give up a copy they already possess that they got legally, and thus there's logically no reason to force archive sites to destroy their copies.
And, more to the point, often times archive copies become legally important when attempting to catch companies in lies, and it would be nice if, even if archive sites are forced to stop distributing the various copies, they still have them to be used as evidence in court.
Yes, we all know you need high-end audio equipment to rip CDs to FLAC. Who knows what kind of horrible static might be introduced in the IDE cables, we know those things can't transmit a clear signal to save their life.
Or, or, I know, I know. Maybe the signal will be read poorly off the hard drive. We know those things can introduce tons of errors.
Were you born this stupid, or did you have to work at it?
Because the library paid for the original copy, and doesn't republish it in duplicate at a later date, for two things.
Whereas, of course, archive.org broke down the door of her house, broke into her computer, forced it to copy her website to disk, and shunk out again.
No, wait, archive.org politely asked for a copy from the server, and was handed one.
They violate the law by handing out copies, (Which is one thing.) but, and this is important, there are no damages, and it's a broken artifact of the law.
After all, they could have just asked for hundreds of thousands of copies originally, and handed them out, once, to each person who asked for them, and that would have been perfectly legal, yes, even if her little 'contract' counted...we already had that court case 100 years ago, you can't control resell (or just giving away) of books, it's called 'Doctrine of First Sale'. If archive.org legally has a copy, they can hand it to whoever they want, they just can't make copies.
Until then, I recommend archive.org 'fix' the problem by continuing to hand out her site, but do so by just requesting a new copy each time, which ought to demonstrate exactly how broken the law is.
I don't think the courts should entertain lawsuits over someone's behavior, when they could have done exactly that behavior in a slightly different way and caused much more, entirely legal, harm. It's like suing someone who walks up to a business, walks in, finds it closed and unmanned, and steps out again, locking the door on the way out, and the business sues because unauthorized people messing with the door locks of a business is illegal under some random law intended to keeps thieves out.
In fact, the 'I could have done things legally, but I would have caused more harm' defense probably is some legit legal defense with some latin name I don't know about.
Looks like she's trying a bit of 'entrapment' probably for monetary gain. I think there's probably a law against it:)
It's not entrapment, but copyright law does require you make reasonable efforts to stop the copyright violation before showing up in court, on the premise that people can be violating your copyright without knowledge. (I.e., someone else falsely claimed copyright on it, and the person in violation thought they had permission.)
In fact, all civil suits require people bringing suit first attempt to limit the harm being done to them. Courts look very poorly on people who 'save up' harm so they can claim someone did them X amount of damages over the years without them even vaguely attempting to resolve the problem.
Granted, after you attempt to stop them, even if they do stop, you can then sue them for any previous harm. (And if they don't stop, you can sue for triple damages, at least under copyright law.)
What do you want to bet that archive.org's first knowledge of this situtation was receiving a lawsuit? And thus she's going to get laugh out of court because she didn't even try to limit the harm, especially considering her rather obvious obvious attempts at getting money from something quite predictable by putting the price of her website at such an absurd amount.
It's even worse than that. Even if they had a sign in English, it wouldn't work. You can't just post random signs anywhere you want asserting things. Trespassing signs, for example, have to be posted at a certain height and at certain intervals.
Next time you're in a gas station, look at where they post their signs about not accepting 100s. The ones that actually don't accept them post them on the gas pump at eye level. (Plenty of places assert they don't accept them, but actually do.) Because, duh, they have to inform you before you take any gas under the assumption that you can pay with your legal tender 100 dollar bill.
And I'm not entirely sure a sign would ever be legal anyway. There's a difference between information they are required to tell people, and a contract. You can't agree to contracts by actions, despite what the software industry claims.
It's like those trucks that say 'This vehicle not responsible for objects thrown from tires'. They can't just assert that's true, and it wouldn't be any better if they prefaced that with 'By following this vehicle, you agree that...'. No, legally, they aren't responsible, and the sign is just informing you.
When a Robot visits a Web site, say http://www.foobar.com/, it firsts checks for http://www.foobar.com/robots.txt. If it can find this document, it will analyze its contents to see if it is allowed to retrieve the document. You can customize the robots.txt file to apply only to specific robots, and to disallow access to specific directories or files.
robots.txt, and the meta tag defined later in the same document, are indeed rules.
Not in that generality. You are allowing transient copies (as is technically necessary for transmission and perception by the recipient). This includes caching, even though there is no fixed grace-period for copies. Instead the purpose of the copy decides its legality: If the copy is only a stand-in for information which exists at the original source, where it is accessible under the same conditions, then it is a cache. If the copy is made to outlast the original or remove access restrictions, then it is copyright infringement.
Um, no. You see, when I ask for something from a web site, I am not the one making the copy. I am asking for a copy, and a machine, presumably under their control, makes one and hands it to me.
Granted, in the process of handing this copy to me, and displaying it on my computer, dozens of other temporary copies are make, which are allowed under various copyright laws and precedents. That doesn't change the fact that I now own that single copy I was handed, and can do anything I want with it, just like a pamplet someone on the street handed me. Baring, of course, copying it, which would be a copyright violation. I can give it away, I can sell it, I can write jokes on it and give that away, I can make a hat out of it and wear it, etc. I can keep it as long as I want.
The real problem people have with calling archive.org a 'copyright violator', is, in theory, archive.org could much less nice and be perfectly legal. How?
Simply retrieve each web page hundreds of thousands of times, and then decrement a counter as people view them, as the copies they legally own are handed out.
Or they could get merely dozens of copies, and 'loan' them to people, using page expirations to 'return' copies.
Either of these ways is immensely stupid, wouldn't actually stop real copying, would require a lot more effort for archive.org, and put a bigger strain on the people they're copying from. But would be perfectly within copyright law.
Oh, and, of course, they don't have to be nice and let you take back the copies they legally own. I don't have to return a book if the publisher decides to stop publishing it. This would let them recoup the costs of having to keep track of all that shit. They're down to fifty copies of some famous page before it was changed? They could sell them for hundreds of dollars each!
Now, a better solution would a law declaring free archives and mirrors legal for things publicly accessible on the internet, with the requirement that such mirroring organizations remove the material from public access upon request, and that said organizations obey any internet standards that would attempt to inform them not mirror it in the first place. (Aka, the robots standard.)
Also it'd be good if someone would add a pseudo-user-agent to robots.txt's Disallow:, like -ARCHIVER-. This would be to disallow all things that present full copies to people, but allow things like Google, which just displays small blurbs not full content. (And possibly something to disallow even presenting blurbs to people, but I don't know how useful that would be over *.) Yes, you can do that already if you know the name of archivers, but that requires knowing them in advance.
No it isn't - I'm not telling you to lie. You really would be starting a company in Illinois. You really would have 2 employees. You wouldn't have much of a product or service, but that still puts you ahead of half the companies out there (at least you aren't spending money to create nothing!).
You realize that this sort behavior will actually break insurance, right? If the people who need it buy and the people who don't don't, you realize it will break?
This is exactly what I am talking about. If Cindy Sheenan had not been such a public $*^%%$&, then Ann Coulter would have been thrown out. But since the Democrat party sided with Sheenan and her like, the conservatives and Republicans had no alternatives. We couldn't exactly say "look, if you get that Ann person out one more time I'm going over with Cindy." If the Democrats had just held more to the center (as in half way between the old Republicans and the old Democrats, not some idealistic version of center), the Republicans would have been forced to the center as well. Obviously the reverse is true as well.
See, this is the sort of crap I'm talking about. First of all, what did Sheenan do? Did she call anyone 'faggot'? Did she suggest they were traitors? Did she proclaim that the 9/11 attackers should have crashed their planes into Bush instead of where they did?
Sheenan was an antiwar protester. That was it. The worse thing she's done is hang out with Hugo Chavez, which was stupid, but Chavez hasn't actually done anything to the US, and the fact the Administration doesn't like him or his economic policies doesn't make him our enemy, and neither does the fact he disapproves of the level of US influence in the region. (I don't like him because of the way he operates WRT to Venezuela's government, which, ironically, is near identical to how Bush operates WRT to ours. You just know Bush is wishing we had 'Enabling Acts', he instead has to ram through legislation in the middle of the night that no one's read.)
She hasn't said anything nearly as bad as Coulter or Limbaugh or Malkin say regularly. The worse quote of hers is that she agrees that Bush is a 'terrorist'.
But that isn't the actual problem with lumping her in with the right-wing hate mongers. The actual problem is, that at no point was she supported by the Democratic Party. She wasn't given a radio show to spew her, according to you, 'evilness' at the world and she wasn't invited to speak at Democratic events.
And, incidentally, it's the same thing with Michael Moore. He has money because of his pro-union and anti-corporate movies and stuff (Where he is quite funny) and has taken that money and used to attack Bush, usually quite accurately. But despite him being held up as an Evil Liberal, he's not, in fact, part of the Democratic machine at all. He doesn't get support from them, he doesn't appear at their events, anything he does is completely unrelated to the Democratic party.
There are bad people, horrible people, who claim to support either party, and say horrible things, like we should kill all Muslims or we should assassinate Bush. The problem is, on the right, those people are tracked down by the right and given radio shows, whereas on the left, those people are tracked down by the right and held up as an example of how evil 'liberals' are.
Hell, even the unrelated people on the left who can work their way into the media, like Moore and Sheehan, who aren't anywhere as bad as the right makes out, aren't supported by the left.
What's funny is that I see it the other way - the media under-reports the excesses of the Democrats, and so they tend to be more corrupt. You aren't seriously suggesting that the media that went out with obviously forged documents were holding back on the real dirt?
The real dirt...like the NSA spying story, which the media was sitting on at exactly that time?
You should just transfer your collection to vinyl if you Care About Music(TM). Although that's kinda hard.
And Apple Lossless sounds so much better than Windows Lossless, you're obviously a troll. And you've forgotten to mention that they should sit on their own hard drive, because putting them on a hard drive used for other things will result in the audio files getting dirty.
Driving on the right side of the road (or left depending on where you are) is codified as a method of avoiding accidents and helping people get where they want to go safely. Another system could be everyone drives on what side they want, the bigger faster vehicles push the smaller vehicles out of the way.
Well, yes. That was rather my point. It's a way of avoiding accidents, not a way to enforce morality. Your alternate idea of pushing vehicles out of the way wouldn't actually work, because a vehicle going 50 can't push a vehicle going the same speed in the opposite direction 'out of the way', no matter how much bigger they are. Even tractor trailers will jackknife on Volkswagons. So it's incredibly doubtful any society would come up with that solution.
The law was written to enforce morality. It may be worth looking at a definition of morality since it seems to not be too clear to a lot of people who have responded. Here is one: "concern with the distinction between good and evil or right and wrong; right or good conduct" Why do we have traffic laws? Because of moral concerns about what is right and wrong in how we get around. A person who landed here from a culture that valued strength and conflict might see driving on the right as immoral as it gave the weak too much opportunity to flourish. What many religions do is argue that their system of morality is derived from an absolute standard that exists outside of mankind. But that is irrelevant to this discussion. My point is that laws are moral judgments.
The conclusion you think you have reached is not actually the one you lead to.
You have demonstrated that societies have specific moralities, and these are reflected in laws and other codes of behavior. (Even informal ones.)
But these morals aren't whatever people claim they are. They are 'freedom', 'no harming others', and 'no cheating', in rough order of importance.
I.e., you, like most people asserting a moral basis to laws, is trying to assert that laws against X are because X is specifically outlawed under some moral code, usually the Bible. This is not correct. Laws against X exist because X violates the societal moral principle of 'freedom', 'no harming others', or 'no cheating'.
And, perhaps more relevantly, the Bible doesn't actually have the first of those, which we got almost entirely whole cloth from the Enlightenment. It has the later two, so is often mistaken as the basis of the laws, and in fact we have some laws hanging around from English concepts where that probably was the idea, but we mostly discarded the ones that weren't compatible with 'freedom', and are discarding more of them over time. (Aka, laws against adultery.)
Adding new laws without taking into consideration 'freedom', quite rightly, gets people fairly annoyed.
Incidentally, a lot of people will make exactly the same argument as me, and just not called these societal principles 'moral' principles. They have a point. Just because you say people should do X doesn't mean X is a moral principle.
People should generally try to refrain from taking a square one away from the edge in Othello, but that doesn't mean it's 'immoral' to do so. It just means that avoiding doing that is most likely to result in a win for you. Likewise, we think we've figured out the way to happiness, (Or, at least, Enlightenment thinkers thought it, and we agree.) and it involves giving everyone as much freedom as possible, carefully constructing rules so that the only interfere to stop bad things.
You can phrase those as if they were moral principles, and in fact the Preamble to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence do so, so it's possible to argue they are 'officially' moral principles in this country, that all men are equal and have rights, period, which is where I'm coming from. Or you can pose them as game theory, that the ideal outcome results when we create these rules and follow them. Or whatever way you want.
Hope this works for you. The cost to form an Illinois LLC is $500. The insurance costs vary depending on the plan you choose, and whether you have a family, but adding all those up probably is cheaper than $15K in 8 years - and then you have insurance if something else goes wrong...
I'll look into it, but it seems like a lot of lying is required.
The main problem right now (from my perspective) is that the Democrats have gone to the fringes.
No they haven't. The Republican have been yammering about how they have, but they really haven't. The ones on the 'fringes', the evil liberals who talk about how nice Hugo Chavez is and how they're glad 9/11 attack, not only are not part of the Democratic party, but not corrected to American politics in any way. Like Ward Churchill, a guy that no one had heard of, and unlike, oh, Ann Coulter.
People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Unlike the Republicans, Democrats don't invite horrible fringe-dwellers to come speak in front of them. The Republicans have a lot of fun tracking down people who 'could' hold liberal viewpoints and putting them up as the position of the Democratic party, but they have people who are actually supported by Republicans who are just as batshit insane as the craziest professor they've managed to track down at some university somewhere who advocates a world government or whatever. (For some reason, the batshit right right seems to be a lot more violent than the batshit left.)
They actually do this on purpose. It's a trick to move political debate. When you have 'important people' yammering how we should invade all Muslim countries and forcibly convert them to Christianity, it becomes more acceptable to invade them to 'liberate' them, and more acceptable to torture 'the bad guys'.
But, hey, the Democrats have been in office for four months. What fringey thing have they done? Raise minimum wage? (Not that fringey, considering they explicitly ran on it, and half a dozen other states voted to raise min wage in that exact election.) Implement the recommendations of the 9-11 commission? Starting a weekly orgy in the rotunda? Where's the craziness?
I think the best outcome is what we have right now. Republicans control one part of government, Democrats control the other. That way they fight - and the easiest way to fight is to point out the other side's problems. So then the turkeys are thrown from office.
I used to think that, too. The problem is that you then have the risk of the Republicans gaining control, and we've just discovered they are so lockstep they could do anything, even Obviously Stupid things. Maybe they'll fall apart and the actual conservative will take over. I'm not a big fan of them, they often don't want to do the smart thing, but at least they don't want to do incredibly stupid ones like pass amendments about flag burning.
I mean really, you couldn't beat Bush last time? What was that! I had thought that anyone would be better than Bush (even if you liked the guy, replacing him would have been good for America - too many burnt bridges by him) - but then I saw who was chosen! (Here's a hint: having a commander in chief during a time of war who is famous for betraying the military is just not cool, OK? I'm from a military family...)
Protesting the Vietnam war isn't betraying your country.
But, anyway, the media threw that election, by sitting on stories and not doing their fucking job. All the stuff that has resulting the mid-30s rating for Bush existed back them except the Iraq war hadn't obviously gone horribly wrong. The spying, the NSL stuff, the Scooter Libby stuff, all sorts of crap. The media either knew about it, or could have trivially found the story and started investigating it. With just the slightly amount of the press doing their job, the Democrats could have taken at least the House at that point and done some investigations.
Wait a second, it was. It was called PICS, and, now, it's done using RDF, and the ICRA has a nice markup using it that is for rating pages on exactly the things parents would care about, in a fairly neutral way.
IE has password-protected support built in. Firefox probably has a way to do it, although I don't know offhand.
Regulating certain types of content to certain ports isn't forcing people to do anything.
Um, what sort of weird logic took you to the place that the government requiring people to put porn on another porn wasn't 'forcing people to do anything'?
More to the point, what sort of weird logic did you use to decide that requiring everyone in existence to go through all their web sites and figure out exactly which ones quality under this law (The government enjoys writing vague laws about 'indecency') and move all them that might be covered, isn't forcing anyone to do anything?
Driving on the right side of the road is a fairly obvious law that doesn't legislate morality, unless you think all the English are immoral.
In reality, laws legislate order, fairness, and non-harm towards others.
Because most religions preach exactly the same thing, and most systems of morality come to the same conclusion, it's easy to mistake the law for morality.
You never get unsolicited emails that have porn photos?
I'd love to have a child-safe internet channel where content was intentionally restricted.
99.99% of spam sent is sent in violation of the law, so I'd like a really good reason as to why spammers would suddenly start obeying the law.
And, incidentally, a lot of people here wouldn't mind a specific kid's area, although using domain names is 100% easier than new random ports. What they do mind is declaring existing places 'kids only', and making everyone move.
The first way, you only have to deal with the rules if you want. And we already have that in various means, like ICRA and stuff to mark up web pages. Basically, any suggestion along the lines of 'a kids safe area' already exists. No one would object to another, and wouldn't really object to a law in regard to lying about it. (Assuming the law wasn't some idiotic religious thing that said for example, mention gay people was 'not kid safe'.) And if webmasters don't want to have to figure it out, they can just ignore it.
But we already have voluntary ratings doing exactly this, so I fail to see the point. A better solution might be to define 'tags' that are, at the start, defined to be embedded in HTML, and operate like trademarks, you can only use them with permission. (Or, at least, stop using them when ordered to by the holder.) This would stop any 'cheating' in the ICRA system, although said cheating does not actually exist, so it's rather moot.
But everyone objects to having to go through all their existing content, figure out what's 'indecent', or 'obscene' and move it, especially when the law is so incredibly unclear on what that means.
I have a pacemaker. Thus I have about $15,000 worth of medical bills every eight years or so when it needs replacing. (I was born with a heart defect, which was fixed, but the surgery weakened my natural pacemaker.) Other than that I'm in okay health.
I call up insurance places, I start telling them my medical history, and they say 'I'm sorry, we cannot insure you.' and hang up.
I live in Georgia. Some states have a 'high risk pool' to insure people, but not Georgia, although we've apparently formed a study group to look into it.
So I don't mean 'I can't get insured for a reasonable price', I mean I can't get insured at all, period.
And, no I don't qualify for any disability or government aid in any way.
And, incidentally, my costs are a good deal higher than they should be because of a) the insurance industry negotiating their prices down, and b) people who use hospital services and do not pay.
OK, so when you see those poor people earning $90,000, you have a point. Until then, you don't. A person making $90,000 pay in a lot more than they will ever receive. A poor person receives a lot more than they will ever pay in. Wealth transfer, QED. (The same applies for Medicare. Old rich people do not use it, because they self insure. Only the poor people use it. Wealth transfer, QED.)
A person paying in $90,000, does, indeed, pay slightly in more than they will receive. However, as I pointed out, that doesn't have anything to do with the '66%' figure you quoted, or anything to do with general revenue. And you're completely ignoring that benefits are actually tied to how much you pay in.
There might be a very slight bias to the poor to social security, but, in general, most people get slightly more than they pay in, and that's it. (Assuming, of course, they live long enough.) I'm not a huge fan of how it's set up, it is, in fact, a pyramid scheme right now, and less and less people are paying benefits to more and more people. But it's not a 'take money from the rich and give to the poor' program, it's 'take money from the young and give slightly more money back to them later'. (Well, give them back the same amount, although obviously not technically the same money.)
But this is the way attacks on the poor happen. Conservatives pretend that programs that help everyone are biased towards the poor, and programs that help only the rich are good and unbiased. Heaven forbid if you want to introduce new programs that help everyone, and you're a communist if you come up with programs to help society by mainly benefiting the poor, like food stamps.
I am all against corruption, I just don't believe that socailists and liberals are any less corrupt than conservatives and Republicans. Liberals are just more careful to hide financial linkages to corporate america because their constituants care more.
You're welcome to demand more accountability from the government, and less spending and campaign finance reform. It's actually astonishing how suddenly all the stuff is important the second liberals are in power, despite the fact that the 'conservatives' set up the biggest funnelling-money-to-legislatures system anyone's ever seen, called K-Street.
Well, you're in luck, because the new Congress is digging up a lot of dirt on everyone and everything. Right now, they're still mostly looking into actual lawbreaking, but eventually they'll get around to looking at conflicts of interest and bribery. Halliburton's so worried they're moving their HQ out of the country so it's harder to get to the documents.
You can keep asserting that the Democrats are as bad or worse as the Republicans, but I, and a good position of the country, simply do not believe it.
They could stop the war on a dime - just don't vote in the money. They won't do this, for the reasons I've already stated. It's easy to talk big when you are a minority - but now that they are a majority they have to tone back, or people will ask why they are not following through...
Um, I'm pretty certain that's what I said they would do. They will not vote to continue to fund the war, or, to make things even more fun, they'll vote to let the president have the money only if it comes with fully-trained and -equiped troops who have had enough off-time between tours and are not injured. Thus ending the war, because said troops simply do not exist.
Congress might even put in something there about not attacking Iran.
Luckily, the founding fathers knew what they were doing when they explicitly said military spending must be reauthorized every two years.
so don't talk to me about the poor not getting coverage - I know that doctors just see you anyway and write it off
Don't talk to me about it. I can't get insured either.
Social Security is from social security taxes, not general revenue, and the rich certainly do not pay the lions share of those. Only the first $90,000 of income a year is taxed for that, and, wherever you got your '66%', they were either deliberately misleading you by presenting you with that number, or you've managed to mislead yourself. So there's 18%, poof, vanished from your math, reducing it to 22%. (And I have no idea where you got the idea only 'the poor' got social security in the first place.)
Likewise, Medicare is not aimed at the poor. Medicare is aimed at the old, regardless of income.
Medicaid is the only program listed that pays out of the general revenue that those 10% pay 66% of and Medicaid...ah, Medicaid. 340 billion dollar program, but the federal government only provides about 60% of the funding, requiring the states to provide the rest. So, let's call it 200 billion.
200 billion of that '50%' that the 10% pay goes to the poor. That's 13% of the revenue, but I'll be generous and say it's '20%'. I wonder how much of the 33% that the other 90% is paying go towards the first 10%? What do you want to bet it's more than 20%? What do you want to bet it's more than 50%?
See, your math doesn't make a lot of sense and isn't really demonstrating what you think it is. The question isn't 'How much goes to the poor?', it's 'Is the percentage collected from the poor equal to the amount paid to the poor?' and all sorts of other questions, like 'What helps everyone, and how much does the government spend on funding that?'
So, you are saying that the DOD only benefits the rich - so the poor don't mind being Muslim.
And why did we attack Iraq, again? For that matter, why were we meddling in the Middle East in the first place, pissing off people enough to attack us? I think you failed to notice that I said 'the military and the foreign policy apparatus'. Other countries do not need militaries so large, because other countries do not constantly meddle in other parts of the world.
I'm not against a useful military, but honestly, corruption in spending has gotten so absurd, as have the reasons we've invaded places. We need to take care of our own people first, help where we, and everyone else, want us to second, and then, if we have any money left over, we can play policeman and mess with people who don't want us.
As for proof of this - the single biggest issue in the last election was the war, right? All Republicans are evil because they support the war, right?
Both the war and the economy were pretty big issues.
But everyone in government knows that the war is necessary. So what you will see is back-stabbing, everyone screaming that the war is evil, etc. But no one actually votes on measures that would stop the war. If a Democrat wins the presidency, the war goes on anyway...
Democrats cannot stop the war, they do not have the votes. Luckily, they can, and will, stop reauthorizing it, or only reauthorize it with impossible goals, like soldiers actually being trained and equipped before being sent over. (I'm in favor of that piece of legislation being a permanent thing for all military engagements. If the president want to send unprepared people over, he can make his case to congress. And, of course, it would only apply to sending them out of the country...if the US is actually invaded, he can use anyone in the military to fight.)
You are obviously young, and haven't thought this stuff through. Please let go of your anger, and engage your mind. Everyone wants to help the poor (and everyone else, for that matter), but when push comes to shove you help those you know, not strangers.
Ironically, when I was young I was much the same sort of idiot you were, thinking both political parties were equal and the least government was the best. Then I noticed that only the Republicans seemed to be insisting that the Government
The President of the US is not obligated to seek the permission of Congress for anything other than lawmaking. That office is allowed to do things like command the army, poop, and have a beer without congressional oversight.
Um, just how stupid are you? First of all, he's not 'obligated to see the permission of Congress for lawmaking', because, duh, he doesn't make laws at all. He can usually find someone in Congress to introduce bills he's written, or, at minimum, ask the VP to introduce them in the House, but technically he has exactly as much legal right to make laws as I do: None at all. We can both write them, and hand them to a Congressman and hope.
Secondly, violating FISA is illegal. He doesn't have to 'ask' or 'be denied' permission to violate laws, be they laws against murder or FISA. They just are laws, and he violates them. Congress can write exceptions for him when they make the laws, if they so choose, but FISA is actually aimed at restricting the president, so it'd be pretty damn stupid for there to an exception for him in it, and it just so happens there is not one.
FISA is a secret court. If they oversaw the program (or not), you and I are not going to know beyond what they choose to release. To claim knowledge of anything else is foolish. However, we do know that FISA did say it oversaw the program.
Um, no, we know that FISA says it didn't, and that the White House agrees it didn't. These facts are not actually in dispute, so I'm not entirely certain why you're arguing them.
Page 9 of the brief shows that FISA OK'd the program.
After the law had been violated for so long, and people actually found out, Bush went to one FISA judge and got a 'blanket authorization' for the program, which is a) not what is required under the law, so the program is still being operated illegally, and b) doesn't excuse the spying before that.
And that judge didn't violate Federal law in pretending to authorize the program, the only violation is the actual spying or ordering the spying, but he should still be removed and disbarred for attempting to authorize a felony.
If this case is really too secret for a court, it proves that the government is commiting illegal activities, which puts them on the same line with terrorists regarding being a threat to the society.
The government committing illegal activities, is, indeed, a threat to our entire society. We are a society of laws, not men, and the idea that the government can do whatever it wants in violation of the law could trivially result in a total destruction of this society.
Terrorists, OTOH, can just threaten our lives, and not very efficiently. The idea they'd be able to threaten our society is an absurd joke. They could kill 3000 people a month and we'd just shrug it off. Maybe some group activities like ballgames would suffer, and more people would telecommute instead of sitting in office buildings, but those are not very important in the large scheme of things.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the pamplet said "you can't do X, Y or Z" with it. If the producer said "how dare you use it to make a hat, it says so on page 5" most people would probably laugh at them (they'd laugh even harder if you couldn't read the language it was written in.)
Right, they threw out such concepts 100 years. You cannot control of the use of a copyrighted work after you sell it, except to the extent you can bar people making copies. (And they automatically can't do that, so you're not really 'barring' them.)
Would it actually need new laws? Maybe this should be a job for existing copyright libraries
It logically shouldn't need new laws. I think a legal defense exists that says 'I could have done the same thing in a legal manner, but I did it in an illegal manner to cause less harm to someone.'. The fact you didn't use all their bandwidth to make yourself legal should be a good thing, and, in a sane legal system, that defense would work.
But I'd much better like a law specifically aimed at them. Libraries already have one sorta like that, but it only covers 'official' libraries, and it only applies to making copies of out of print books.
Which is not the same a requiring them to destroy their copies...
Ha, you caught that. Yeah, copyright laws applies to, of course, making copies, which archive sites do. It can't make someone give up a copy they already possess that they got legally, and thus there's logically no reason to force archive sites to destroy their copies.
And, more to the point, often times archive copies become legally important when attempting to catch companies in lies, and it would be nice if, even if archive sites are forced to stop distributing the various copies, they still have them to be used as evidence in court.
Yes, we all know you need high-end audio equipment to rip CDs to FLAC. Who knows what kind of horrible static might be introduced in the IDE cables, we know those things can't transmit a clear signal to save their life.
Or, or, I know, I know. Maybe the signal will be read poorly off the hard drive. We know those things can introduce tons of errors.
Were you born this stupid, or did you have to work at it?
Because the library paid for the original copy, and doesn't republish it in duplicate at a later date, for two things.
Whereas, of course, archive.org broke down the door of her house, broke into her computer, forced it to copy her website to disk, and shunk out again.
No, wait, archive.org politely asked for a copy from the server, and was handed one.
They violate the law by handing out copies, (Which is one thing.) but, and this is important, there are no damages, and it's a broken artifact of the law.
After all, they could have just asked for hundreds of thousands of copies originally, and handed them out, once, to each person who asked for them, and that would have been perfectly legal, yes, even if her little 'contract' counted...we already had that court case 100 years ago, you can't control resell (or just giving away) of books, it's called 'Doctrine of First Sale'. If archive.org legally has a copy, they can hand it to whoever they want, they just can't make copies.
Until then, I recommend archive.org 'fix' the problem by continuing to hand out her site, but do so by just requesting a new copy each time, which ought to demonstrate exactly how broken the law is.
I don't think the courts should entertain lawsuits over someone's behavior, when they could have done exactly that behavior in a slightly different way and caused much more, entirely legal, harm. It's like suing someone who walks up to a business, walks in, finds it closed and unmanned, and steps out again, locking the door on the way out, and the business sues because unauthorized people messing with the door locks of a business is illegal under some random law intended to keeps thieves out.
In fact, the 'I could have done things legally, but I would have caused more harm' defense probably is some legit legal defense with some latin name I don't know about.
She sued them for racketeering and theft? WTF?
I've always admired AICN for the courage to have such a fucking horrible looking web site.
Looks like she's trying a bit of 'entrapment' probably for monetary gain. I think there's probably a law against it :)
It's not entrapment, but copyright law does require you make reasonable efforts to stop the copyright violation before showing up in court, on the premise that people can be violating your copyright without knowledge. (I.e., someone else falsely claimed copyright on it, and the person in violation thought they had permission.)
In fact, all civil suits require people bringing suit first attempt to limit the harm being done to them. Courts look very poorly on people who 'save up' harm so they can claim someone did them X amount of damages over the years without them even vaguely attempting to resolve the problem.
Granted, after you attempt to stop them, even if they do stop, you can then sue them for any previous harm. (And if they don't stop, you can sue for triple damages, at least under copyright law.)
What do you want to bet that archive.org's first knowledge of this situtation was receiving a lawsuit? And thus she's going to get laugh out of court because she didn't even try to limit the harm, especially considering her rather obvious obvious attempts at getting money from something quite predictable by putting the price of her website at such an absurd amount.
It's even worse than that. Even if they had a sign in English, it wouldn't work. You can't just post random signs anywhere you want asserting things. Trespassing signs, for example, have to be posted at a certain height and at certain intervals.
Next time you're in a gas station, look at where they post their signs about not accepting 100s. The ones that actually don't accept them post them on the gas pump at eye level. (Plenty of places assert they don't accept them, but actually do.) Because, duh, they have to inform you before you take any gas under the assumption that you can pay with your legal tender 100 dollar bill.
And I'm not entirely sure a sign would ever be legal anyway. There's a difference between information they are required to tell people, and a contract. You can't agree to contracts by actions, despite what the software industry claims.
It's like those trucks that say 'This vehicle not responsible for objects thrown from tires'. They can't just assert that's true, and it wouldn't be any better if they prefaced that with 'By following this vehicle, you agree that...'. No, legally, they aren't responsible, and the sign is just informing you.
Her web pages appear to be HTML.
Wow, look at that. Right in the damn HTML4 spec:
The robots.txt file
When a Robot visits a Web site, say http://www.foobar.com/, it firsts checks for http://www.foobar.com/robots.txt. If it can find this document, it will analyze its contents to see if it is allowed to retrieve the document. You can customize the robots.txt file to apply only to specific robots, and to disallow access to specific directories or files.
robots.txt, and the meta tag defined later in the same document, are indeed rules.
Not in that generality. You are allowing transient copies (as is technically necessary for transmission and perception by the recipient). This includes caching, even though there is no fixed grace-period for copies. Instead the purpose of the copy decides its legality: If the copy is only a stand-in for information which exists at the original source, where it is accessible under the same conditions, then it is a cache. If the copy is made to outlast the original or remove access restrictions, then it is copyright infringement.
Um, no. You see, when I ask for something from a web site, I am not the one making the copy. I am asking for a copy, and a machine, presumably under their control, makes one and hands it to me.
Granted, in the process of handing this copy to me, and displaying it on my computer, dozens of other temporary copies are make, which are allowed under various copyright laws and precedents. That doesn't change the fact that I now own that single copy I was handed, and can do anything I want with it, just like a pamplet someone on the street handed me. Baring, of course, copying it, which would be a copyright violation. I can give it away, I can sell it, I can write jokes on it and give that away, I can make a hat out of it and wear it, etc. I can keep it as long as I want.
The real problem people have with calling archive.org a 'copyright violator', is, in theory, archive.org could much less nice and be perfectly legal. How?
Simply retrieve each web page hundreds of thousands of times, and then decrement a counter as people view them, as the copies they legally own are handed out.
Or they could get merely dozens of copies, and 'loan' them to people, using page expirations to 'return' copies.
Either of these ways is immensely stupid, wouldn't actually stop real copying, would require a lot more effort for archive.org, and put a bigger strain on the people they're copying from. But would be perfectly within copyright law.
Oh, and, of course, they don't have to be nice and let you take back the copies they legally own. I don't have to return a book if the publisher decides to stop publishing it. This would let them recoup the costs of having to keep track of all that shit. They're down to fifty copies of some famous page before it was changed? They could sell them for hundreds of dollars each!
Now, a better solution would a law declaring free archives and mirrors legal for things publicly accessible on the internet, with the requirement that such mirroring organizations remove the material from public access upon request, and that said organizations obey any internet standards that would attempt to inform them not mirror it in the first place. (Aka, the robots standard.)
Also it'd be good if someone would add a pseudo-user-agent to robots.txt's Disallow:, like -ARCHIVER-. This would be to disallow all things that present full copies to people, but allow things like Google, which just displays small blurbs not full content. (And possibly something to disallow even presenting blurbs to people, but I don't know how useful that would be over *.) Yes, you can do that already if you know the name of archivers, but that requires knowing them in advance.
No it isn't - I'm not telling you to lie. You really would be starting a company in Illinois. You really would have 2 employees. You wouldn't have much of a product or service, but that still puts you ahead of half the companies out there (at least you aren't spending money to create nothing!).
You realize that this sort behavior will actually break insurance, right? If the people who need it buy and the people who don't don't, you realize it will break?
This is exactly what I am talking about. If Cindy Sheenan had not been such a public $*^%%$&, then Ann Coulter would have been thrown out. But since the Democrat party sided with Sheenan and her like, the conservatives and Republicans had no alternatives. We couldn't exactly say "look, if you get that Ann person out one more time I'm going over with Cindy." If the Democrats had just held more to the center (as in half way between the old Republicans and the old Democrats, not some idealistic version of center), the Republicans would have been forced to the center as well. Obviously the reverse is true as well.
See, this is the sort of crap I'm talking about. First of all, what did Sheenan do? Did she call anyone 'faggot'? Did she suggest they were traitors? Did she proclaim that the 9/11 attackers should have crashed their planes into Bush instead of where they did?
Sheenan was an antiwar protester. That was it. The worse thing she's done is hang out with Hugo Chavez, which was stupid, but Chavez hasn't actually done anything to the US, and the fact the Administration doesn't like him or his economic policies doesn't make him our enemy, and neither does the fact he disapproves of the level of US influence in the region. (I don't like him because of the way he operates WRT to Venezuela's government, which, ironically, is near identical to how Bush operates WRT to ours. You just know Bush is wishing we had 'Enabling Acts', he instead has to ram through legislation in the middle of the night that no one's read.)
She hasn't said anything nearly as bad as Coulter or Limbaugh or Malkin say regularly. The worse quote of hers is that she agrees that Bush is a 'terrorist'.
But that isn't the actual problem with lumping her in with the right-wing hate mongers. The actual problem is, that at no point was she supported by the Democratic Party. She wasn't given a radio show to spew her, according to you, 'evilness' at the world and she wasn't invited to speak at Democratic events.
And, incidentally, it's the same thing with Michael Moore. He has money because of his pro-union and anti-corporate movies and stuff (Where he is quite funny) and has taken that money and used to attack Bush, usually quite accurately. But despite him being held up as an Evil Liberal, he's not, in fact, part of the Democratic machine at all. He doesn't get support from them, he doesn't appear at their events, anything he does is completely unrelated to the Democratic party.
There are bad people, horrible people, who claim to support either party, and say horrible things, like we should kill all Muslims or we should assassinate Bush. The problem is, on the right, those people are tracked down by the right and given radio shows, whereas on the left, those people are tracked down by the right and held up as an example of how evil 'liberals' are.
Hell, even the unrelated people on the left who can work their way into the media, like Moore and Sheehan, who aren't anywhere as bad as the right makes out, aren't supported by the left.
What's funny is that I see it the other way - the media under-reports the excesses of the Democrats, and so they tend to be more corrupt. You aren't seriously suggesting that the media that went out with obviously forged documents were holding back on the real dirt?
The real dirt...like the NSA spying story, which the media was sitting on at exactly that time?
I'm suggesting that the media didn't do any wor
Anyone know of any other great sounding devices that rip, convert, and burn?
Dozens of manufacturers have a device that can do that. I believe they're called 'computers'.
You should just transfer your collection to vinyl if you Care About Music(TM). Although that's kinda hard.
And Apple Lossless sounds so much better than Windows Lossless, you're obviously a troll. And you've forgotten to mention that they should sit on their own hard drive, because putting them on a hard drive used for other things will result in the audio files getting dirty.
It is a reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and thus, by definition, is not obscure on slashdot.
Driving on the right side of the road (or left depending on where you are) is codified as a method of avoiding accidents and helping people get where they want to go safely. Another system could be everyone drives on what side they want, the bigger faster vehicles push the smaller vehicles out of the way.
Well, yes. That was rather my point. It's a way of avoiding accidents, not a way to enforce morality. Your alternate idea of pushing vehicles out of the way wouldn't actually work, because a vehicle going 50 can't push a vehicle going the same speed in the opposite direction 'out of the way', no matter how much bigger they are. Even tractor trailers will jackknife on Volkswagons. So it's incredibly doubtful any society would come up with that solution.
The law was written to enforce morality. It may be worth looking at a definition of morality since it seems to not be too clear to a lot of people who have responded. Here is one: "concern with the distinction between good and evil or right and wrong; right or good conduct" Why do we have traffic laws? Because of moral concerns about what is right and wrong in how we get around. A person who landed here from a culture that valued strength and conflict might see driving on the right as immoral as it gave the weak too much opportunity to flourish. What many religions do is argue that their system of morality is derived from an absolute standard that exists outside of mankind. But that is irrelevant to this discussion. My point is that laws are moral judgments.
The conclusion you think you have reached is not actually the one you lead to.
You have demonstrated that societies have specific moralities, and these are reflected in laws and other codes of behavior. (Even informal ones.)
But these morals aren't whatever people claim they are. They are 'freedom', 'no harming others', and 'no cheating', in rough order of importance.
I.e., you, like most people asserting a moral basis to laws, is trying to assert that laws against X are because X is specifically outlawed under some moral code, usually the Bible. This is not correct. Laws against X exist because X violates the societal moral principle of 'freedom', 'no harming others', or 'no cheating'.
And, perhaps more relevantly, the Bible doesn't actually have the first of those, which we got almost entirely whole cloth from the Enlightenment. It has the later two, so is often mistaken as the basis of the laws, and in fact we have some laws hanging around from English concepts where that probably was the idea, but we mostly discarded the ones that weren't compatible with 'freedom', and are discarding more of them over time. (Aka, laws against adultery.)
Adding new laws without taking into consideration 'freedom', quite rightly, gets people fairly annoyed.
Incidentally, a lot of people will make exactly the same argument as me, and just not called these societal principles 'moral' principles. They have a point. Just because you say people should do X doesn't mean X is a moral principle.
People should generally try to refrain from taking a square one away from the edge in Othello, but that doesn't mean it's 'immoral' to do so. It just means that avoiding doing that is most likely to result in a win for you. Likewise, we think we've figured out the way to happiness, (Or, at least, Enlightenment thinkers thought it, and we agree.) and it involves giving everyone as much freedom as possible, carefully constructing rules so that the only interfere to stop bad things.
You can phrase those as if they were moral principles, and in fact the Preamble to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence do so, so it's possible to argue they are 'officially' moral principles in this country, that all men are equal and have rights, period, which is where I'm coming from. Or you can pose them as game theory, that the ideal outcome results when we create these rules and follow them. Or whatever way you want.
Hope this works for you. The cost to form an Illinois LLC is $500. The insurance costs vary depending on the plan you choose, and whether you have a family, but adding all those up probably is cheaper than $15K in 8 years - and then you have insurance if something else goes wrong...
I'll look into it, but it seems like a lot of lying is required.
The main problem right now (from my perspective) is that the Democrats have gone to the fringes.
No they haven't. The Republican have been yammering about how they have, but they really haven't. The ones on the 'fringes', the evil liberals who talk about how nice Hugo Chavez is and how they're glad 9/11 attack, not only are not part of the Democratic party, but not corrected to American politics in any way. Like Ward Churchill, a guy that no one had heard of, and unlike, oh, Ann Coulter.
People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Unlike the Republicans, Democrats don't invite horrible fringe-dwellers to come speak in front of them. The Republicans have a lot of fun tracking down people who 'could' hold liberal viewpoints and putting them up as the position of the Democratic party, but they have people who are actually supported by Republicans who are just as batshit insane as the craziest professor they've managed to track down at some university somewhere who advocates a world government or whatever. (For some reason, the batshit right right seems to be a lot more violent than the batshit left.)
They actually do this on purpose. It's a trick to move political debate. When you have 'important people' yammering how we should invade all Muslim countries and forcibly convert them to Christianity, it becomes more acceptable to invade them to 'liberate' them, and more acceptable to torture 'the bad guys'.
But, hey, the Democrats have been in office for four months. What fringey thing have they done? Raise minimum wage? (Not that fringey, considering they explicitly ran on it, and half a dozen other states voted to raise min wage in that exact election.) Implement the recommendations of the 9-11 commission? Starting a weekly orgy in the rotunda? Where's the craziness?
I think the best outcome is what we have right now. Republicans control one part of government, Democrats control the other. That way they fight - and the easiest way to fight is to point out the other side's problems. So then the turkeys are thrown from office.
I used to think that, too. The problem is that you then have the risk of the Republicans gaining control, and we've just discovered they are so lockstep they could do anything, even Obviously Stupid things. Maybe they'll fall apart and the actual conservative will take over. I'm not a big fan of them, they often don't want to do the smart thing, but at least they don't want to do incredibly stupid ones like pass amendments about flag burning.
I mean really, you couldn't beat Bush last time? What was that! I had thought that anyone would be better than Bush (even if you liked the guy, replacing him would have been good for America - too many burnt bridges by him) - but then I saw who was chosen! (Here's a hint: having a commander in chief during a time of war who is famous for betraying the military is just not cool, OK? I'm from a military family...)
Protesting the Vietnam war isn't betraying your country.
But, anyway, the media threw that election, by sitting on stories and not doing their fucking job. All the stuff that has resulting the mid-30s rating for Bush existed back them except the Iraq war hadn't obviously gone horribly wrong. The spying, the NSL stuff, the Scooter Libby stuff, all sorts of crap. The media either knew about it, or could have trivially found the story and started investigating it. With just the slightly amount of the press doing their job, the Democrats could have taken at least the House at that point and done some investigations.
Kerry couldn't have won that
Ah, if only that had been invented years ago.
Wait a second, it was. It was called PICS, and, now, it's done using RDF, and the ICRA has a nice markup using it that is for rating pages on exactly the things parents would care about, in a fairly neutral way.
IE has password-protected support built in. Firefox probably has a way to do it, although I don't know offhand.
Regulating certain types of content to certain ports isn't forcing people to do anything.
Um, what sort of weird logic took you to the place that the government requiring people to put porn on another porn wasn't 'forcing people to do anything'?
More to the point, what sort of weird logic did you use to decide that requiring everyone in existence to go through all their web sites and figure out exactly which ones quality under this law (The government enjoys writing vague laws about 'indecency') and move all them that might be covered, isn't forcing anyone to do anything?
Driving on the right side of the road is a fairly obvious law that doesn't legislate morality, unless you think all the English are immoral.
In reality, laws legislate order, fairness, and non-harm towards others.
Because most religions preach exactly the same thing, and most systems of morality come to the same conclusion, it's easy to mistake the law for morality.
You never get unsolicited emails that have porn photos?
I'd love to have a child-safe internet channel where content was intentionally restricted.
99.99% of spam sent is sent in violation of the law, so I'd like a really good reason as to why spammers would suddenly start obeying the law.
And, incidentally, a lot of people here wouldn't mind a specific kid's area, although using domain names is 100% easier than new random ports. What they do mind is declaring existing places 'kids only', and making everyone move.
The first way, you only have to deal with the rules if you want. And we already have that in various means, like ICRA and stuff to mark up web pages. Basically, any suggestion along the lines of 'a kids safe area' already exists. No one would object to another, and wouldn't really object to a law in regard to lying about it. (Assuming the law wasn't some idiotic religious thing that said for example, mention gay people was 'not kid safe'.) And if webmasters don't want to have to figure it out, they can just ignore it.
But we already have voluntary ratings doing exactly this, so I fail to see the point. A better solution might be to define 'tags' that are, at the start, defined to be embedded in HTML, and operate like trademarks, you can only use them with permission. (Or, at least, stop using them when ordered to by the holder.) This would stop any 'cheating' in the ICRA system, although said cheating does not actually exist, so it's rather moot.
But everyone objects to having to go through all their existing content, figure out what's 'indecent', or 'obscene' and move it, especially when the law is so incredibly unclear on what that means.
I have a pacemaker. Thus I have about $15,000 worth of medical bills every eight years or so when it needs replacing. (I was born with a heart defect, which was fixed, but the surgery weakened my natural pacemaker.) Other than that I'm in okay health.
I call up insurance places, I start telling them my medical history, and they say 'I'm sorry, we cannot insure you.' and hang up.
I live in Georgia. Some states have a 'high risk pool' to insure people, but not Georgia, although we've apparently formed a study group to look into it.
So I don't mean 'I can't get insured for a reasonable price', I mean I can't get insured at all, period.
And, no I don't qualify for any disability or government aid in any way.
And, incidentally, my costs are a good deal higher than they should be because of a) the insurance industry negotiating their prices down, and b) people who use hospital services and do not pay.
OK, so when you see those poor people earning $90,000, you have a point. Until then, you don't. A person making $90,000 pay in a lot more than they will ever receive. A poor person receives a lot more than they will ever pay in. Wealth transfer, QED. (The same applies for Medicare. Old rich people do not use it, because they self insure. Only the poor people use it. Wealth transfer, QED.)
A person paying in $90,000, does, indeed, pay slightly in more than they will receive. However, as I pointed out, that doesn't have anything to do with the '66%' figure you quoted, or anything to do with general revenue. And you're completely ignoring that benefits are actually tied to how much you pay in.
There might be a very slight bias to the poor to social security, but, in general, most people get slightly more than they pay in, and that's it. (Assuming, of course, they live long enough.) I'm not a huge fan of how it's set up, it is, in fact, a pyramid scheme right now, and less and less people are paying benefits to more and more people. But it's not a 'take money from the rich and give to the poor' program, it's 'take money from the young and give slightly more money back to them later'. (Well, give them back the same amount, although obviously not technically the same money.)
But this is the way attacks on the poor happen. Conservatives pretend that programs that help everyone are biased towards the poor, and programs that help only the rich are good and unbiased. Heaven forbid if you want to introduce new programs that help everyone, and you're a communist if you come up with programs to help society by mainly benefiting the poor, like food stamps.
I am all against corruption, I just don't believe that socailists and liberals are any less corrupt than conservatives and Republicans. Liberals are just more careful to hide financial linkages to corporate america because their constituants care more.
You're welcome to demand more accountability from the government, and less spending and campaign finance reform. It's actually astonishing how suddenly all the stuff is important the second liberals are in power, despite the fact that the 'conservatives' set up the biggest funnelling-money-to-legislatures system anyone's ever seen, called K-Street.
Well, you're in luck, because the new Congress is digging up a lot of dirt on everyone and everything. Right now, they're still mostly looking into actual lawbreaking, but eventually they'll get around to looking at conflicts of interest and bribery. Halliburton's so worried they're moving their HQ out of the country so it's harder to get to the documents.
You can keep asserting that the Democrats are as bad or worse as the Republicans, but I, and a good position of the country, simply do not believe it.
They could stop the war on a dime - just don't vote in the money. They won't do this, for the reasons I've already stated. It's easy to talk big when you are a minority - but now that they are a majority they have to tone back, or people will ask why they are not following through...
Um, I'm pretty certain that's what I said they would do. They will not vote to continue to fund the war, or, to make things even more fun, they'll vote to let the president have the money only if it comes with fully-trained and -equiped troops who have had enough off-time between tours and are not injured. Thus ending the war, because said troops simply do not exist.
Congress might even put in something there about not attacking Iran.
Luckily, the founding fathers knew what they were doing when they explicitly said military spending must be reauthorized every two years.
so don't talk to me about the poor not getting coverage - I know that doctors just see you anyway and write it off
Don't talk to me about it. I can't get insured either.
Social Security is from social security taxes, not general revenue, and the rich certainly do not pay the lions share of those. Only the first $90,000 of income a year is taxed for that, and, wherever you got your '66%', they were either deliberately misleading you by presenting you with that number, or you've managed to mislead yourself. So there's 18%, poof, vanished from your math, reducing it to 22%. (And I have no idea where you got the idea only 'the poor' got social security in the first place.)
Likewise, Medicare is not aimed at the poor. Medicare is aimed at the old, regardless of income.
Medicaid is the only program listed that pays out of the general revenue that those 10% pay 66% of and Medicaid...ah, Medicaid. 340 billion dollar program, but the federal government only provides about 60% of the funding, requiring the states to provide the rest. So, let's call it 200 billion.
200 billion of that '50%' that the 10% pay goes to the poor. That's 13% of the revenue, but I'll be generous and say it's '20%'. I wonder how much of the 33% that the other 90% is paying go towards the first 10%? What do you want to bet it's more than 20%? What do you want to bet it's more than 50%?
See, your math doesn't make a lot of sense and isn't really demonstrating what you think it is. The question isn't 'How much goes to the poor?', it's 'Is the percentage collected from the poor equal to the amount paid to the poor?' and all sorts of other questions, like 'What helps everyone, and how much does the government spend on funding that?'
So, you are saying that the DOD only benefits the rich - so the poor don't mind being Muslim.
And why did we attack Iraq, again? For that matter, why were we meddling in the Middle East in the first place, pissing off people enough to attack us? I think you failed to notice that I said 'the military and the foreign policy apparatus'. Other countries do not need militaries so large, because other countries do not constantly meddle in other parts of the world.
I'm not against a useful military, but honestly, corruption in spending has gotten so absurd, as have the reasons we've invaded places. We need to take care of our own people first, help where we, and everyone else, want us to second, and then, if we have any money left over, we can play policeman and mess with people who don't want us.
As for proof of this - the single biggest issue in the last election was the war, right? All Republicans are evil because they support the war, right?
Both the war and the economy were pretty big issues.
But everyone in government knows that the war is necessary. So what you will see is back-stabbing, everyone screaming that the war is evil, etc. But no one actually votes on measures that would stop the war. If a Democrat wins the presidency, the war goes on anyway...
Democrats cannot stop the war, they do not have the votes. Luckily, they can, and will, stop reauthorizing it, or only reauthorize it with impossible goals, like soldiers actually being trained and equipped before being sent over. (I'm in favor of that piece of legislation being a permanent thing for all military engagements. If the president want to send unprepared people over, he can make his case to congress. And, of course, it would only apply to sending them out of the country...if the US is actually invaded, he can use anyone in the military to fight.)
You are obviously young, and haven't thought this stuff through. Please let go of your anger, and engage your mind. Everyone wants to help the poor (and everyone else, for that matter), but when push comes to shove you help those you know, not strangers.
Ironically, when I was young I was much the same sort of idiot you were, thinking both political parties were equal and the least government was the best. Then I noticed that only the Republicans seemed to be insisting that the Government
The President of the US is not obligated to seek the permission of Congress for anything other than lawmaking. That office is allowed to do things like command the army, poop, and have a beer without congressional oversight.
Um, just how stupid are you? First of all, he's not 'obligated to see the permission of Congress for lawmaking', because, duh, he doesn't make laws at all. He can usually find someone in Congress to introduce bills he's written, or, at minimum, ask the VP to introduce them in the House, but technically he has exactly as much legal right to make laws as I do: None at all. We can both write them, and hand them to a Congressman and hope.
Secondly, violating FISA is illegal. He doesn't have to 'ask' or 'be denied' permission to violate laws, be they laws against murder or FISA. They just are laws, and he violates them. Congress can write exceptions for him when they make the laws, if they so choose, but FISA is actually aimed at restricting the president, so it'd be pretty damn stupid for there to an exception for him in it, and it just so happens there is not one.
FISA is a secret court. If they oversaw the program (or not), you and I are not going to know beyond what they choose to release. To claim knowledge of anything else is foolish. However, we do know that FISA did say it oversaw the program.
Um, no, we know that FISA says it didn't, and that the White House agrees it didn't. These facts are not actually in dispute, so I'm not entirely certain why you're arguing them.
Page 9 of the brief shows that FISA OK'd the program.
After the law had been violated for so long, and people actually found out, Bush went to one FISA judge and got a 'blanket authorization' for the program, which is a) not what is required under the law, so the program is still being operated illegally, and b) doesn't excuse the spying before that.
And that judge didn't violate Federal law in pretending to authorize the program, the only violation is the actual spying or ordering the spying, but he should still be removed and disbarred for attempting to authorize a felony.
If this case is really too secret for a court, it proves that the government is commiting illegal activities, which puts them on the same line with terrorists regarding being a threat to the society.
The government committing illegal activities, is, indeed, a threat to our entire society. We are a society of laws, not men, and the idea that the government can do whatever it wants in violation of the law could trivially result in a total destruction of this society.
Terrorists, OTOH, can just threaten our lives, and not very efficiently. The idea they'd be able to threaten our society is an absurd joke. They could kill 3000 people a month and we'd just shrug it off. Maybe some group activities like ballgames would suffer, and more people would telecommute instead of sitting in office buildings, but those are not very important in the large scheme of things.
When are we going to hold the government accountable for its' actions?
November 7, 2006