I like that idea about consecutive terms. It would completely demolish the fucked-up senoritity system within the Senate.
The progressive movement was, on a whole, a good thing, but that really should tbe huge failure it's remembered for. (Instead of Prohibition)
They were trying to suck power away from the states, which were indeed often standing in the way of what the majority wanted, but they did that by giving the Federal goverment more control. Taking power away from the states was seriously needed, way too many states were operated, in essense, by businesses in the states, but turning the reins over to the Feds was fucking stupid.
It would have been infinitely better to produce Federal checks on the states that could only be operated by the people within the state, Constitutional amendments like a 'Dissolve and reform a state government with a 80% majority on new Constitution' and 'States must allow citizens to propose and vote on state constitutional amendments ', stuff like that.
Instead, yeah, they delibrately kicked out the legs of the states, and, in the process, produced only two bodies, in the same town, that businesses had to bribe. If a Senator's main goal was to please his state government, then things would operate little differently.
Incidentally, while we're making changes, why only two Senators? Representives average more than five per state! If we rise the number to that, or even six per state (Then we replace one a year, nice and even.), it would more accurately represent the legistlative bodies in each state. That is, assuming they set up some sort of system to comprimise, and don't just vote on each one seperately, but most bodies of that sort have a 'committee' system that lets groups get filled out 'fairly'.
Of course, that would completely screw up the number of electors sent by each state, which would require more changes to fix, so maybe not.
Sexual abuse of children is, indeed, probably a lot bigger problem than this 'terrorism' that injuries less people than I could with a good deal less resources, but stopping child pornography would hardly dent the problem.
Most sexual assault of children happens mainly by 'trusted people' who find the child sexually attractive. As most people do not find prepubescents attractive, almost all sexual abuse is done on children 13 and older. However, these people don't need illegal images. People who get aroused by a mature-looking 13-year old also get aroused by a young-looking 18-year old, and that is infinititely safer legally.
And thus, almost all child porn (And the sexual assualt that goes along with that.) happens on prepubescents. The child porn industry is entirely driven by pedophiles, because they can't get any sort of legal images that are close enough.
So by concentrating on the child porn industry, we're fighting a very small subset of sexual abuse. Granted, it might be 'more vulerable' subset, given that teenagers have more ability and options to defend themselves, but it's very small nevertheless.
Fighting child pornography is a bit like fighting dumping murder victims in the ocean. Yes that is, indeed, illegal, but the murder is the important bit. Stopping that wouldn't stop murder, because most murders don't involve that at all.
There's a way to stop any sort of hostage-taking ever again. We just need to have the guts and willingness to use it a few times.
Specifically, refuse to talk to them, refused to interact with them in anyway except announcing they have five minutes to release everyone, or preferably come out themselves leaving the hostages safely inside, or we're storming the building and killing them, no matter how many hostages they have. They release all the hostages, then maybe we can negotiate a surrender.
And then do it.
And if someone's holding a gun to someone's head, we just shoot them. If we don't have a clear shot because of the hostage, we take out the hostage. Preferably non-fatally, but we do whatever it takes to get a clear shot at the hostage taker.
Yeah, a lot of people will die at first.
And then, at some point, no hostage will ever die again, because it doesn't work. Taking hostages will just mean you're up for murder when they get killed during the assault, instead of, say, bank robbery.
We just, as society, need to stand up and say 'You cannot threaten people to get us to cooperate, ever. You threaten someone, and we will work even harder to see you caught, we'll charge you with more crimes, and we won't let the welfare of the person you're threatening stop us.'.
I hoped this would be a general realization after 9/11, but, sadly, it only seems to apply to people holding hostages on airplanes. I have to point out it took one plane standing up and saying 'You'll have to kill us all.' and pretty much all of society realized that hijacking planes was impossible, and we've had like three airplane lunatics already taken out by passengers, regardless of who they were threatening at the time. Maybe it only takes one policy statement by the government and one bank robbery with hostages that they storm to change people's behavior everywhere else.
More to the point, these were extended retroactively, which is fucking absurd. Someone tell me how extending the copyright from 50 years after his death to 70 years is going to make John Lennon write more music.
You don't 'steal' rights, you dipwad, you violate them.
To steal a right would imply that a right is a physical object that can be moved from one person to another. Right are not objects, they are abilities granted under the law. (Some, according to the US constitution, are abilities granted by mere existence, but copyright is not one of them.)
You could assert someone 'stole' a right if they used an unethical means to get the government to transfer a right from some person to themselves (Technically that's fraud, but whatever.), but that's obviously not what people infringing copyright are doing.
And, while you didn't point it, give them more chance of slipping that person past security, especially if the rules is 'We search the ten most 'suspicious' people, because all they have to is have 11 people, 10 really suspicious and one not at all, and have that last person carry the weapons.
Of course, the idiotic watch list has exactly the same problems, and that hasn't stopped airlines from using it. All that thing does is tell people we suspect them of being terrorists, causing great annoyance to hundreds of thousands of non-terrorists, and causing actual terrorists to go 'Damn, better get some new fake ID and lay low for a while.'.
Oh, and thanks to the rules, they can run people through repeatedly and see who we think is suspicious. 'Well, that guy went to this specific training camp and he's getting searched almost every time, but this guy went this other camp instead, and he's not getting searched hardly at all. Hey, who else do we know who went to that camp?'.
Really good logic there. Let's tell terrorists exactly which people are suspicious.
Ooo...oooo...and next we can drop fliers onthe doorstep of terrorists saying we're going to search their house, tomorrow or possibly the next day. That'll show those terrorists! There's no way they could use that information to help conceal their activities.
This is like security run by the three stooges. It is, as Schneier said, 'security theatre'. It is play-acting at being secure.
People ask me where to get music online, and I have no idea what the current p2p thing is. They ask where I got my music from, and usually don't believe me that XXXREDACTEDXXX even exists until I show them.
If they could show that you purposefully downloaded a song that you knew to be copyrighted and that you also knew the person supplying you with the song was not authorized to distribute that song, you would still be guilty of willfully violating copyright laws.
I don't know of any law under which they could do that. Seriously. Just because something seems 'wrong', or is the other half of an illegal act, doesn't make it illegal. It's not legal to build or sell a house in violation of various building codes, but it's legal to live in them, for example. In my state, it's illegal for teenagers to purchase cigarettes, but it's legal for them to smoke them. Laws don't always make sense.
And copyright laws dates back to a time when there was a fundemental principle of the law that said: 'You should always know if an action is illegal'. This is why they used to require a copyright notice, so you know if it was legal to make copies. More importantly, if someone handed you a work, be it copyrighted or not, you are allowed to assume they have the right to do so, because there is no obvious magical way to determine if they have the right or not. You only had to care about copyright if you wanted to copy it.
This principle has taken a beating in recent years, but there's still no legal requirement to know that a work is copyrighted (unless you want to copy it), that the distributer of the work has permission to do so, that the distributed is actually following their contact and returning royalties, or anything of that sort, at all. However, if the RIAA could, somehow, demonstrate that all that was, in fact, known, there is still no law against it, although their certainly could be, like receiving stolen property. But there isn't such a law, and the RIAA wishing and hoping and threatening and speaking gibberish won't magically make such a law appear out of thin air.
For one, it's far more difficult for the RIAA to collect information on downloaders than uploaders. They would have to aggregate a lot of data over a period of time...with uploaders, the entire list of songs being shared can be retrieved fairly trivially. This would be made more difficult by the fact that many people access the internet in such a way that their IP changes over time. Since they don't know someone's identity until they've won their motion for discovery, they wouldn't be able to associate separate browsing sessions with each other and, worse yet, could assemble a single profile that represents the browsing of several different individuals.
No, that doesn't make any sense. They can prove some user downloaded from them, whereas they can't prove anyone downloaded a shared song, just that some person shared it. It would be a lot safer court case, pretending it was illegal.
Also, even if they were able to collect all the necessary data on a user, it could be argued that the RIAA is legally able to distribute the copyrighted content and no copyright infringement occurred.
Well, that's why they couldn't do it, but their lawyers or someone hired to gather evidence could. However, even pretending downloading was illegal, sharing without authorization is certainly illegal, and, as you pointed out, if they're sharing with authorization, they're essentially operating iTMS without DRM or charging.
1 is completely wrong. Under no interpetation of copyright law can they bring a lawsuit against you for illegal downloading. None at all.
Your confusion is understandable, however, as every single news story gets this wrong, talking about 'p2p downloaders', when, even if it was demonstrated that they were downloaders, that wouldn't be the slightest bit illegal. It's akin to calling muggers 'pants owners'...almost all muggers do, indeed, own a pair of pants, and even use it during the commision of a crime, but they aren't being arrested for that. It's fucking PR by the media companies that are owned by the same people doing the lawsuit to try to make people think downloading is illegal.
Anyway, what the RIAA is bring suit on is the idea that you distributed copyrighted files. Aka, that people downloaded from you. As there is no way on a p2p network to know this, not even, in most cases, by the server, that seems a little unlikely for them to be able to prove.
Bittorrent is a little different. The RIAA is still doing mainly traditional p2p stuff, and, frankly, very little music is traded using bittorrent, but it might be a reasonable legal assumption that any file downloaded by someone via bittorrent has also been uploaded by them to someone else. OTOH, various forms of caching have been found legal, and arguably that's really all you're doing...the person running the torrent is the one who actually put it in the system. And they'd have to demonstrate that you actually allowed your client to upload anything.
However, as the article pointed out, as they don't even have any evidence you have the files, just files with names that imply they are copyrighted work, their case is incredibly weak and if they actually ended up in court, they'd lose, period. At minimum they'd have to demonstrate that you actually made their work available, and a screenshot produced by someone in their employ is not a demonstration of that, or even a screenshot produced and witnessed by an independent party.
Then they'd at least have to prove some likelyhood of someone having gotten that file, in whole or in part, from you.
See, the problem with the RIAA's lawsuit is that they could do all this before sueing people. They could match up username and IP, demonstrate to the court's satifaction that said user was violating their copyright, and then have a slam dunk case as soon as they tracked down that IP, which isn't anywhere near as hard with a court order as the RIAA is apparently having with it, suing people who don't even have computers.
Instead, their sole purpose seems to be to make the news fighting 'downloaders', which ike I said, isn't even illegal, and producing a word-of-mouth intimadation campaign.
If they were actually trying to fight piracy, they'd be going after the binary Usenet posters, which would be, incidentally, infinitely easier to fight in court, as none of them unknowningly shared their music directory and didn't know they were pirates, the result of their activity can be check from a multitude of places so it can't be fake, Usenet providers already retain a history of posters for abuse purposes, they post whole albums in lossless formats, including cover and disc scans, which are a exact-same-quality replacement for the album, etc, etc.
No, they're going after p2p 'downloaders' (Despite the fact they have to attack them via their uploading) for PR about how evil downloading is, and nothing else.
It's not such much 'no involvement' as 'actually trusted by both side'. Someone who has a lot of Israel and Palestine interests is actually perfect for the job.
The only countries that would really be ruled out are other Arab countries, or Muslim theocracies, by Israel, and America and possibly England, by Palestine. (Although England used to manage that whole area just fine.)
It's not like they'd be fighting a war. The sole goal would be to keep the peace until Palestine can stand on its own.
See, the problem here is that Palestine doesn't trust Israel, and I think they have a valid argument there with various Israeli actions in the past, like attempts to steal land and collective punishments. Yet Israel is in charge of maintaining order in Palestine. The second that became anyone else's responsiblity, tensions would dramatically decrease.
Or, to put it another way, Israel adopted Palestine 50 years ago, and, frankly, it's not working out. Palestine has behavioral problems, and when it misbehaves, Israel beats it and locks it in the basement, and ocassionally one or both of them goes insane and starts hurting the other with assault weapons. I think we need to accept the fact that Israel is not the correct parent for Palestine at this point in time, and assign someone else. Anyone else. I think, and I could be wrong, but I think that within a decade or two we'd actually have a functioning goverment there.
Of course, Palestine and Israel still need to work together, they are two countries intertwined and share many resources and infrastructure. I just want someone else to take over the 'maintain order' relationship. Israel is abusive, and Palestine has learned to hate them.
For example, when a car alarm goes off, that means someone is trying to steal it. It might have scared them away temporarily, but they'll certainly be back to steal the car.
And, remember, it is legal to commit a lesser crime to prevent a larger one. For example, to stop felony grand theft auto, feel free to commit misdemeanor vandalism by slashing the tires of the car, keeping that pesky car thief from making off it with it. You might want to slash two of them, as most cars have spares in the trunk, and obviously car thiefs can get in there if they can get inside the car to set off the alarm. (Surely they have to get inside the car, no one would be crazy enough to have an alarm that goes off when people merely touch a car.)
When the car owner finally shows up, he'll be very grateful that his car is still there. If you have time, though, you might want to leave a note for him that says the time his alarm went off, and telling him that he should have the police dust the inside of the car for fingerprints to try to track down the thieves. But I like to be an anonymous hero, walking past with a quick bend-and-slash, stroll to the next wheel, bend-and-slash, saving their car, and walking off with the mere satifaction of a job well done being my only reward.
The really sad thing was, this war is a failure. Hezbollah is basically kicking Israel's ass. Israel has killing a lot of innocent people, and nearly destroyed Lebanon, but hasn't apparently harmed Hezbollah ability to operate at all. Meanwhile, it has raises Hezbollah's popular support, and seriously crippled the only thing keeping it in check, the Lebanon government, which cannot function without infrastructure.
You know that joke 'The beatings will continue until morale improves.'? How about 'I will continue punching you in the face until the people fighting me surrenders.'.
You might get pissed at the person they're looking for, if you don't approve of that person's actions. Key word 'might'. You also might not really care about that person's actions, or actually approve of them. (Remember, Hezbollah was providing various services to southern Lebanon that the government wasn't.)
And if they keep punching you in the face, and refuse to stop long enough for you to give them the directions they need, or if you try to help them and they punch you some more, or if they then go and punch your mother in the face...welll...at some point, any empathy you might have with them is gone.
We're well past that point. Israel has made a huge enemy of one county that, despite being occupied by them for a long time, actually kinda liked Israel, and was one of the few non-theocracies around there. They just had a houseguest they couldn't get rid of that liked to take potshots out their windows. Lebanon's a country that could have been an enemy of Israel, yet wasn't, or, at least, wasn't until right now, because Israel just burned down their fucking house, instead of, as you pointed out, working with them to get rid of said houseguest.
Incidentally, this is exactly the point of UN peacekeepers. They grab a force from, oh, India or Russia or China, someone neutral in all this, and patrol the border and border areas.
However, Israel has resisted UN peacekeepers with all their power, because parts of their government doesn't fucking want peace. They want to end up with all of Palestine, or as much as possible. (Pretty much all of Palestine would be happier with UN troups than Israel troups in their streets.)
The US has gone along with this, because part of our government wants continual wars in the Middle East, and Israel is the best possible flashpoint. Hence the support of both Israel and Palestine, although they keep having their work cut out to make Israel look like the saint and Palestine the villian, and the UN look like a bunch of anti-semitics.
First all, forget the barcode. If a computer is printing it, it can print OCRable letters and just read it straight, with the added advantage that if something happens to the ballot, the text can be read by hand.
Second, I like your seral number idea, and there is actually a pretty eash and safe way to do that. Just print a 'box number' for each 'roll' or stack or whatever of unprinted ballots, and within each stack, number the ballots, but not in order. I.e., if a stack is 100 ballots, assign the numbers 00-99 randomly, before they are sent out. This keeps anyone from counting and saying 'You were the sixteenth person at that machine, and here is ballot number 16.'.
Then record that number in the voting machine. I.e., it knows who it printed on ballot 34028-09. Also, it should come up with a random number and print that on the ballot, and store that.
It's possible to combine computers and paper ballots and make a sense that is computerly unbreakable, or, at least, so hard to break that it is easier to pay election officials to let you physically use the machines more than once.
What does it cost to clean up after a meth lab explodes and destroys a city block?
I dunno, what's it cost when a gas station blows up and destroys a city block? Oh, wait, that doesn't happen, because there are safety codes for legal businesses. Not to mention meth labs are dangerous because of the materials they are starting with and how they are trying to make it. Real labs making methamphetamine never, under any circumstances, blow up, anymore than aspirin labs do. A meth lab that can legally get the correct ingredients, instead of having to distill them from other stuff, is perfectly safe.
More importantly, what is the value of a human life? Addiction destroys the lives of its users and those close to them. I know a guy serving many years in prison for what happened when a drug deal went bad. Now his life and the life of the deceased party are both gone because of drugs. I was never close to him but I know that he had great potential.
So...let me see if I get this story straight:
Someone was in an illegal drug deal, it went bad as illegal transactions often do, they ended up killing someone and spending years in jail, thus ruining two lives.
Let's, for the hell of it, replace 'drug' in that with 'rutabaga':
Someone was in an illegal rutabaga deal, it went bad as illegal transactions often do, they ended up killing someone and spending years in jail, thus ruining two lives.
You know, there doesn't appear to be anything in that story that actually depends on the illegal product being drugs. Instead, it appears your friend's life was ruined because he was attempting to buy or sell certain goods that someone wanted to own, but, unlike rutabaga, are illegal.
I fail to see how continuing to make drugs illegal will stop this. After all, they were illegal when it happened. Making them harder to get will just up the price, which, logically, would introduce more money into the equation and make it more likely that 'deals would go bad'. That solution is a non-solution.
My solution, on the other hand, would change the transation from 'completely dangerous' to 'liquor store dangerous'. Almost no one gets killed when purchasing or selling alcohol, at least, not when compared to the illegal markets.
You all seem to be forgetting the fact that ephedra was practically banned a few years back, so getting it is much harder than it used to be.
If by 'it', you mean ephedra, it is harder only by a tiny amount. If by 'it' you mean meth, no, it's not. Most meth isn't from tiny labs, it's from large drug trafficers making it out of country and smuggling it in. The whole 'homemade meth lab' crackdown is a political move, it's almost completely pointless, you could track down ever single one of those and you'd get maybe 1/10th the meth production. It's akin to cracking down on people with five marijuana plants in the greenhouse. People who make meth at home are meth addicts who don't want to or can't buy it, and the labs are idiotic risks for the return value.
And tiny labs just switched to pseudoepherine anyway.
No one can ever claim that anything done to corporations is 'anticapitalist', you fucktard. Corporations are fictions that receieve special priviledges from the government. They don't even exist without the government.
The thing you have to do before raising the minimum wage, and will actually end up 'raising' it by itself, is to stop anyone, anywhere, from working below that wage.
Now, this can either be done by getting rid of illegal immigrants, or by making companies pay them the correct amount. Either way.
But, once you've bumped them up, you've leveled the wages of a good deal of jobs. If you did that by legalizing people, you've also brought in a lot of workers to compete, but people competing with them shouldn't worry that much, because, to be frank, they can speak better English.
By pushing the actual floor up to min wage, everything has to get adjusted from that point. The 'more skilled' positions are going to have to pay more attract workers who'd rather just take one of those jobs that they don't do anything, and the 'less attractive' posititions are going to have to do the same.
Anyway, your analyze is completely flawed. While it's true that upping the min wage will change inflatation to adjust the wage back down, that doesn't mean that inflation doesn't happen regardless. 5.15 an hour has been seriously reduced by inflation since it was passed, and it can be adjusted back to where it was without causing inflation much inflation.
Right now we have inflation without wages going up, because companies are charging more for goods while wages remain stagnant, because they're siphoning more and more out the top. Which, I think we can all agree, is a lot worse than inflation with wages going up.
Of course, doing something about that would actually do alot more for wages than screwing around with the minimum one.
Does the meth addict cost society more than ten dollars a day? Let's assume it costs a few thousand to bust a meth lab, that each mugging costs, in addition to whatever was stolen, at least five hundred dollars in police time, and that each burglary costs maybe two thousand.
It's very hard to see how that could possibly average to less than ten dollars a day per addict.
So, to rephrase in another way: The illegality of drugs is costing much much more than it would be if we just bought meth addicts all the drugs they wanted. At street prices, and I'm sure the manufacturing price is much lower.
Damn yes I want to legalize drugs. There is no way to logically reduce the supply of meth to zero, and thus all 'stopping' it will do is reduce the supply and thus raise the price, thus resulting in more addicts who can't afford to pay for it. Um, duh. We've already see what happens with crack, let's keep meth affordable, shall we?
And, incidentally, around here (the mountains of Georgia), teenagers and semi-random adults do make meth. Meth labs have replaced illegal stills. They just get their supplies from organized crime, or from other people who get it from organized crime, or at least mild-organized crime. You're right in that this idea of people buying large amounts of Sudafed and making it into meth is a bit silly...if people are buying large amount of Sudafed, they're just kids drinking it to get high. Meth is made from much 'purer' drugs that are usually either really stolen or 'stolen' with the help of doctors.
Because almost no one actually watches the movie, and thus almost no one realizes Bambi is a boy?
Actually, I have no idea on this one. I suspect there was some other famous Bambi between that Bambi and present day, but I do not know who. Bambi, at some point, became a stereotype name for an even-dumber Barbie, and it's kinda weird.
Why? Because you can't lure prepubescents with porn, you twit.
There probably are sickos out there using terms children search on to lure them into something, although I have to point out that there are a hell of a lot fewer than them than people think there are, and most of them prey on children they have legitimate access to, not random kids they'd have to kidnap.
But, anyway...why the hell would they have porn on their page? Little kids do not want porn. And putting porn there is a great way to get some parent to notice what's going on.
The best way to lure a little kid would be to make an actual site about things kids were interested in, with a discussion board with private messaging or something.
The reason there are porn sites with 'child' keywords is that there does not exist a fetish so weird that it can't be marketed to. However, porn sites don't want children, either, and usually have ICRA ratings, which web browsers can block on.
No, you person with a reading comprehension problem, I'm saying a Senator is a Congressman. Senators are a subset of Congressmen. All members of the group 'Senator' are included in the group 'Congressmen'(1). There is no defination of 'Congressman' that excludes 'Senator' in any law or even tradition, and assuming 'Congressman' means 'Man who is in Congress', the Constution is quite clear on who is 'in Congress', even to the point of referencing to a group of both Representatives and Senators as 'Members of Congress'.
1) Or, obviously, Congresswomen, but that's an entirely different debate.
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I like that idea about consecutive terms. It would completely demolish the fucked-up senoritity system within the Senate.
The progressive movement was, on a whole, a good thing, but that really should tbe huge failure it's remembered for. (Instead of Prohibition)
They were trying to suck power away from the states, which were indeed often standing in the way of what the majority wanted, but they did that by giving the Federal goverment more control. Taking power away from the states was seriously needed, way too many states were operated, in essense, by businesses in the states, but turning the reins over to the Feds was fucking stupid.
It would have been infinitely better to produce Federal checks on the states that could only be operated by the people within the state, Constitutional amendments like a 'Dissolve and reform a state government with a 80% majority on new Constitution' and 'States must allow citizens to propose and vote on state constitutional amendments ', stuff like that.
Instead, yeah, they delibrately kicked out the legs of the states, and, in the process, produced only two bodies, in the same town, that businesses had to bribe. If a Senator's main goal was to please his state government, then things would operate little differently.
Incidentally, while we're making changes, why only two Senators? Representives average more than five per state! If we rise the number to that, or even six per state (Then we replace one a year, nice and even.), it would more accurately represent the legistlative bodies in each state. That is, assuming they set up some sort of system to comprimise, and don't just vote on each one seperately, but most bodies of that sort have a 'committee' system that lets groups get filled out 'fairly'.
Of course, that would completely screw up the number of electors sent by each state, which would require more changes to fix, so maybe not.
Sexual abuse of children is, indeed, probably a lot bigger problem than this 'terrorism' that injuries less people than I could with a good deal less resources, but stopping child pornography would hardly dent the problem.
Most sexual assault of children happens mainly by 'trusted people' who find the child sexually attractive. As most people do not find prepubescents attractive, almost all sexual abuse is done on children 13 and older. However, these people don't need illegal images. People who get aroused by a mature-looking 13-year old also get aroused by a young-looking 18-year old, and that is infinititely safer legally.
And thus, almost all child porn (And the sexual assualt that goes along with that.) happens on prepubescents. The child porn industry is entirely driven by pedophiles, because they can't get any sort of legal images that are close enough.
So by concentrating on the child porn industry, we're fighting a very small subset of sexual abuse. Granted, it might be 'more vulerable' subset, given that teenagers have more ability and options to defend themselves, but it's very small nevertheless.
Fighting child pornography is a bit like fighting dumping murder victims in the ocean. Yes that is, indeed, illegal, but the murder is the important bit. Stopping that wouldn't stop murder, because most murders don't involve that at all.
There's a way to stop any sort of hostage-taking ever again. We just need to have the guts and willingness to use it a few times.
Specifically, refuse to talk to them, refused to interact with them in anyway except announcing they have five minutes to release everyone, or preferably come out themselves leaving the hostages safely inside, or we're storming the building and killing them, no matter how many hostages they have. They release all the hostages, then maybe we can negotiate a surrender.
And then do it.
And if someone's holding a gun to someone's head, we just shoot them. If we don't have a clear shot because of the hostage, we take out the hostage. Preferably non-fatally, but we do whatever it takes to get a clear shot at the hostage taker.
Yeah, a lot of people will die at first.
And then, at some point, no hostage will ever die again, because it doesn't work. Taking hostages will just mean you're up for murder when they get killed during the assault, instead of, say, bank robbery.
We just, as society, need to stand up and say 'You cannot threaten people to get us to cooperate, ever. You threaten someone, and we will work even harder to see you caught, we'll charge you with more crimes, and we won't let the welfare of the person you're threatening stop us.'.
I hoped this would be a general realization after 9/11, but, sadly, it only seems to apply to people holding hostages on airplanes. I have to point out it took one plane standing up and saying 'You'll have to kill us all.' and pretty much all of society realized that hijacking planes was impossible, and we've had like three airplane lunatics already taken out by passengers, regardless of who they were threatening at the time. Maybe it only takes one policy statement by the government and one bank robbery with hostages that they storm to change people's behavior everywhere else.
More to the point, these were extended retroactively, which is fucking absurd. Someone tell me how extending the copyright from 50 years after his death to 70 years is going to make John Lennon write more music.
You don't 'steal' rights, you dipwad, you violate them.
To steal a right would imply that a right is a physical object that can be moved from one person to another. Right are not objects, they are abilities granted under the law. (Some, according to the US constitution, are abilities granted by mere existence, but copyright is not one of them.)
You could assert someone 'stole' a right if they used an unethical means to get the government to transfer a right from some person to themselves (Technically that's fraud, but whatever.), but that's obviously not what people infringing copyright are doing.
And, while you didn't point it, give them more chance of slipping that person past security, especially if the rules is 'We search the ten most 'suspicious' people, because all they have to is have 11 people, 10 really suspicious and one not at all, and have that last person carry the weapons.
Of course, the idiotic watch list has exactly the same problems, and that hasn't stopped airlines from using it. All that thing does is tell people we suspect them of being terrorists, causing great annoyance to hundreds of thousands of non-terrorists, and causing actual terrorists to go 'Damn, better get some new fake ID and lay low for a while.'.
Oh, and thanks to the rules, they can run people through repeatedly and see who we think is suspicious. 'Well, that guy went to this specific training camp and he's getting searched almost every time, but this guy went this other camp instead, and he's not getting searched hardly at all. Hey, who else do we know who went to that camp?'.
Really good logic there. Let's tell terrorists exactly which people are suspicious.
Ooo...oooo...and next we can drop fliers onthe doorstep of terrorists saying we're going to search their house, tomorrow or possibly the next day. That'll show those terrorists! There's no way they could use that information to help conceal their activities.
This is like security run by the three stooges. It is, as Schneier said, 'security theatre'. It is play-acting at being secure.
It is rather surreal, isn't it?
People ask me where to get music online, and I have no idea what the current p2p thing is. They ask where I got my music from, and usually don't believe me that XXXREDACTEDXXX even exists until I show them.
If they could show that you purposefully downloaded a song that you knew to be copyrighted and that you also knew the person supplying you with the song was not authorized to distribute that song, you would still be guilty of willfully violating copyright laws.
I don't know of any law under which they could do that. Seriously. Just because something seems 'wrong', or is the other half of an illegal act, doesn't make it illegal. It's not legal to build or sell a house in violation of various building codes, but it's legal to live in them, for example. In my state, it's illegal for teenagers to purchase cigarettes, but it's legal for them to smoke them. Laws don't always make sense.
And copyright laws dates back to a time when there was a fundemental principle of the law that said: 'You should always know if an action is illegal'. This is why they used to require a copyright notice, so you know if it was legal to make copies. More importantly, if someone handed you a work, be it copyrighted or not, you are allowed to assume they have the right to do so, because there is no obvious magical way to determine if they have the right or not. You only had to care about copyright if you wanted to copy it.
This principle has taken a beating in recent years, but there's still no legal requirement to know that a work is copyrighted (unless you want to copy it), that the distributer of the work has permission to do so, that the distributed is actually following their contact and returning royalties, or anything of that sort, at all. However, if the RIAA could, somehow, demonstrate that all that was, in fact, known, there is still no law against it, although their certainly could be, like receiving stolen property. But there isn't such a law, and the RIAA wishing and hoping and threatening and speaking gibberish won't magically make such a law appear out of thin air.
For one, it's far more difficult for the RIAA to collect information on downloaders than uploaders. They would have to aggregate a lot of data over a period of time...with uploaders, the entire list of songs being shared can be retrieved fairly trivially. This would be made more difficult by the fact that many people access the internet in such a way that their IP changes over time. Since they don't know someone's identity until they've won their motion for discovery, they wouldn't be able to associate separate browsing sessions with each other and, worse yet, could assemble a single profile that represents the browsing of several different individuals.
No, that doesn't make any sense. They can prove some user downloaded from them, whereas they can't prove anyone downloaded a shared song, just that some person shared it. It would be a lot safer court case, pretending it was illegal.
Also, even if they were able to collect all the necessary data on a user, it could be argued that the RIAA is legally able to distribute the copyrighted content and no copyright infringement occurred.
Well, that's why they couldn't do it, but their lawyers or someone hired to gather evidence could. However, even pretending downloading was illegal, sharing without authorization is certainly illegal, and, as you pointed out, if they're sharing with authorization, they're essentially operating iTMS without DRM or charging.
I think that says it all.
1 is completely wrong. Under no interpetation of copyright law can they bring a lawsuit against you for illegal downloading. None at all.
Your confusion is understandable, however, as every single news story gets this wrong, talking about 'p2p downloaders', when, even if it was demonstrated that they were downloaders, that wouldn't be the slightest bit illegal. It's akin to calling muggers 'pants owners'...almost all muggers do, indeed, own a pair of pants, and even use it during the commision of a crime, but they aren't being arrested for that. It's fucking PR by the media companies that are owned by the same people doing the lawsuit to try to make people think downloading is illegal.
Anyway, what the RIAA is bring suit on is the idea that you distributed copyrighted files. Aka, that people downloaded from you. As there is no way on a p2p network to know this, not even, in most cases, by the server, that seems a little unlikely for them to be able to prove.
Bittorrent is a little different. The RIAA is still doing mainly traditional p2p stuff, and, frankly, very little music is traded using bittorrent, but it might be a reasonable legal assumption that any file downloaded by someone via bittorrent has also been uploaded by them to someone else. OTOH, various forms of caching have been found legal, and arguably that's really all you're doing...the person running the torrent is the one who actually put it in the system. And they'd have to demonstrate that you actually allowed your client to upload anything.
However, as the article pointed out, as they don't even have any evidence you have the files, just files with names that imply they are copyrighted work, their case is incredibly weak and if they actually ended up in court, they'd lose, period. At minimum they'd have to demonstrate that you actually made their work available, and a screenshot produced by someone in their employ is not a demonstration of that, or even a screenshot produced and witnessed by an independent party.
Then they'd at least have to prove some likelyhood of someone having gotten that file, in whole or in part, from you.
See, the problem with the RIAA's lawsuit is that they could do all this before sueing people. They could match up username and IP, demonstrate to the court's satifaction that said user was violating their copyright, and then have a slam dunk case as soon as they tracked down that IP, which isn't anywhere near as hard with a court order as the RIAA is apparently having with it, suing people who don't even have computers.
Instead, their sole purpose seems to be to make the news fighting 'downloaders', which ike I said, isn't even illegal, and producing a word-of-mouth intimadation campaign.
If they were actually trying to fight piracy, they'd be going after the binary Usenet posters, which would be, incidentally, infinitely easier to fight in court, as none of them unknowningly shared their music directory and didn't know they were pirates, the result of their activity can be check from a multitude of places so it can't be fake, Usenet providers already retain a history of posters for abuse purposes, they post whole albums in lossless formats, including cover and disc scans, which are a exact-same-quality replacement for the album, etc, etc.
No, they're going after p2p 'downloaders' (Despite the fact they have to attack them via their uploading) for PR about how evil downloading is, and nothing else.
Cool.
Incidentally, your sig doesn't seem to do what you think it does.
It's not such much 'no involvement' as 'actually trusted by both side'. Someone who has a lot of Israel and Palestine interests is actually perfect for the job.
The only countries that would really be ruled out are other Arab countries, or Muslim theocracies, by Israel, and America and possibly England, by Palestine. (Although England used to manage that whole area just fine.)
It's not like they'd be fighting a war. The sole goal would be to keep the peace until Palestine can stand on its own.
See, the problem here is that Palestine doesn't trust Israel, and I think they have a valid argument there with various Israeli actions in the past, like attempts to steal land and collective punishments. Yet Israel is in charge of maintaining order in Palestine. The second that became anyone else's responsiblity, tensions would dramatically decrease.
Or, to put it another way, Israel adopted Palestine 50 years ago, and, frankly, it's not working out. Palestine has behavioral problems, and when it misbehaves, Israel beats it and locks it in the basement, and ocassionally one or both of them goes insane and starts hurting the other with assault weapons. I think we need to accept the fact that Israel is not the correct parent for Palestine at this point in time, and assign someone else. Anyone else. I think, and I could be wrong, but I think that within a decade or two we'd actually have a functioning goverment there.
Of course, Palestine and Israel still need to work together, they are two countries intertwined and share many resources and infrastructure. I just want someone else to take over the 'maintain order' relationship. Israel is abusive, and Palestine has learned to hate them.
How the hell would UN peacekeepers in Palestine rape Israeli children? What is this, telepathic sexual assualt?
Like I said, it's the Israelis that want to keep their military in Palestine instead of replacing them with UN peacekeepers in Palestine.
Oh, no, alarms are serious business.
For example, when a car alarm goes off, that means someone is trying to steal it. It might have scared them away temporarily, but they'll certainly be back to steal the car.
And, remember, it is legal to commit a lesser crime to prevent a larger one. For example, to stop felony grand theft auto, feel free to commit misdemeanor vandalism by slashing the tires of the car, keeping that pesky car thief from making off it with it. You might want to slash two of them, as most cars have spares in the trunk, and obviously car thiefs can get in there if they can get inside the car to set off the alarm. (Surely they have to get inside the car, no one would be crazy enough to have an alarm that goes off when people merely touch a car.)
When the car owner finally shows up, he'll be very grateful that his car is still there. If you have time, though, you might want to leave a note for him that says the time his alarm went off, and telling him that he should have the police dust the inside of the car for fingerprints to try to track down the thieves. But I like to be an anonymous hero, walking past with a quick bend-and-slash, stroll to the next wheel, bend-and-slash, saving their car, and walking off with the mere satifaction of a job well done being my only reward.
The really sad thing was, this war is a failure. Hezbollah is basically kicking Israel's ass. Israel has killing a lot of innocent people, and nearly destroyed Lebanon, but hasn't apparently harmed Hezbollah ability to operate at all. Meanwhile, it has raises Hezbollah's popular support, and seriously crippled the only thing keeping it in check, the Lebanon government, which cannot function without infrastructure.
You know that joke 'The beatings will continue until morale improves.'? How about 'I will continue punching you in the face until the people fighting me surrenders.'.
You might get pissed at the person they're looking for, if you don't approve of that person's actions. Key word 'might'. You also might not really care about that person's actions, or actually approve of them. (Remember, Hezbollah was providing various services to southern Lebanon that the government wasn't.)
And if they keep punching you in the face, and refuse to stop long enough for you to give them the directions they need, or if you try to help them and they punch you some more, or if they then go and punch your mother in the face...welll...at some point, any empathy you might have with them is gone.
We're well past that point. Israel has made a huge enemy of one county that, despite being occupied by them for a long time, actually kinda liked Israel, and was one of the few non-theocracies around there. They just had a houseguest they couldn't get rid of that liked to take potshots out their windows. Lebanon's a country that could have been an enemy of Israel, yet wasn't, or, at least, wasn't until right now, because Israel just burned down their fucking house, instead of, as you pointed out, working with them to get rid of said houseguest.
Incidentally, this is exactly the point of UN peacekeepers. They grab a force from, oh, India or Russia or China, someone neutral in all this, and patrol the border and border areas.
However, Israel has resisted UN peacekeepers with all their power, because parts of their government doesn't fucking want peace. They want to end up with all of Palestine, or as much as possible. (Pretty much all of Palestine would be happier with UN troups than Israel troups in their streets.)
The US has gone along with this, because part of our government wants continual wars in the Middle East, and Israel is the best possible flashpoint. Hence the support of both Israel and Palestine, although they keep having their work cut out to make Israel look like the saint and Palestine the villian, and the UN look like a bunch of anti-semitics.
I, on the other hand, would love to see a 20,000 meter long soundwave.
How the hell would you even generate that?
You have some good idea, but a few flaws.
First all, forget the barcode. If a computer is printing it, it can print OCRable letters and just read it straight, with the added advantage that if something happens to the ballot, the text can be read by hand.
Second, I like your seral number idea, and there is actually a pretty eash and safe way to do that. Just print a 'box number' for each 'roll' or stack or whatever of unprinted ballots, and within each stack, number the ballots, but not in order. I.e., if a stack is 100 ballots, assign the numbers 00-99 randomly, before they are sent out. This keeps anyone from counting and saying 'You were the sixteenth person at that machine, and here is ballot number 16.'.
Then record that number in the voting machine. I.e., it knows who it printed on ballot 34028-09. Also, it should come up with a random number and print that on the ballot, and store that.
It's possible to combine computers and paper ballots and make a sense that is computerly unbreakable, or, at least, so hard to break that it is easier to pay election officials to let you physically use the machines more than once.
What does it cost to clean up after a meth lab explodes and destroys a city block?
I dunno, what's it cost when a gas station blows up and destroys a city block? Oh, wait, that doesn't happen, because there are safety codes for legal businesses. Not to mention meth labs are dangerous because of the materials they are starting with and how they are trying to make it. Real labs making methamphetamine never, under any circumstances, blow up, anymore than aspirin labs do. A meth lab that can legally get the correct ingredients, instead of having to distill them from other stuff, is perfectly safe.
More importantly, what is the value of a human life? Addiction destroys the lives of its users and those close to them. I know a guy serving many years in prison for what happened when a drug deal went bad. Now his life and the life of the deceased party are both gone because of drugs. I was never close to him but I know that he had great potential.
So...let me see if I get this story straight:
Someone was in an illegal drug deal, it went bad as illegal transactions often do, they ended up killing someone and spending years in jail, thus ruining two lives.
Let's, for the hell of it, replace 'drug' in that with 'rutabaga':
Someone was in an illegal rutabaga deal, it went bad as illegal transactions often do, they ended up killing someone and spending years in jail, thus ruining two lives.
You know, there doesn't appear to be anything in that story that actually depends on the illegal product being drugs. Instead, it appears your friend's life was ruined because he was attempting to buy or sell certain goods that someone wanted to own, but, unlike rutabaga, are illegal.
I fail to see how continuing to make drugs illegal will stop this. After all, they were illegal when it happened. Making them harder to get will just up the price, which, logically, would introduce more money into the equation and make it more likely that 'deals would go bad'. That solution is a non-solution.
My solution, on the other hand, would change the transation from 'completely dangerous' to 'liquor store dangerous'. Almost no one gets killed when purchasing or selling alcohol, at least, not when compared to the illegal markets.
You all seem to be forgetting the fact that ephedra was practically banned a few years back, so getting it is much harder than it used to be.
If by 'it', you mean ephedra, it is harder only by a tiny amount. If by 'it' you mean meth, no, it's not. Most meth isn't from tiny labs, it's from large drug trafficers making it out of country and smuggling it in. The whole 'homemade meth lab' crackdown is a political move, it's almost completely pointless, you could track down ever single one of those and you'd get maybe 1/10th the meth production. It's akin to cracking down on people with five marijuana plants in the greenhouse. People who make meth at home are meth addicts who don't want to or can't buy it, and the labs are idiotic risks for the return value.
And tiny labs just switched to pseudoepherine anyway.
No one can ever claim that anything done to corporations is 'anticapitalist', you fucktard. Corporations are fictions that receieve special priviledges from the government. They don't even exist without the government.
The thing you have to do before raising the minimum wage, and will actually end up 'raising' it by itself, is to stop anyone, anywhere, from working below that wage.
Now, this can either be done by getting rid of illegal immigrants, or by making companies pay them the correct amount. Either way.
But, once you've bumped them up, you've leveled the wages of a good deal of jobs. If you did that by legalizing people, you've also brought in a lot of workers to compete, but people competing with them shouldn't worry that much, because, to be frank, they can speak better English.
By pushing the actual floor up to min wage, everything has to get adjusted from that point. The 'more skilled' positions are going to have to pay more attract workers who'd rather just take one of those jobs that they don't do anything, and the 'less attractive' posititions are going to have to do the same.
Anyway, your analyze is completely flawed. While it's true that upping the min wage will change inflatation to adjust the wage back down, that doesn't mean that inflation doesn't happen regardless. 5.15 an hour has been seriously reduced by inflation since it was passed, and it can be adjusted back to where it was without causing inflation much inflation.
Right now we have inflation without wages going up, because companies are charging more for goods while wages remain stagnant, because they're siphoning more and more out the top. Which, I think we can all agree, is a lot worse than inflation with wages going up.
Of course, doing something about that would actually do alot more for wages than screwing around with the minimum one.
Well, let's see.
Does the meth addict cost society more than ten dollars a day? Let's assume it costs a few thousand to bust a meth lab, that each mugging costs, in addition to whatever was stolen, at least five hundred dollars in police time, and that each burglary costs maybe two thousand.
It's very hard to see how that could possibly average to less than ten dollars a day per addict.
So, to rephrase in another way: The illegality of drugs is costing much much more than it would be if we just bought meth addicts all the drugs they wanted. At street prices, and I'm sure the manufacturing price is much lower.
Damn yes I want to legalize drugs. There is no way to logically reduce the supply of meth to zero, and thus all 'stopping' it will do is reduce the supply and thus raise the price, thus resulting in more addicts who can't afford to pay for it. Um, duh. We've already see what happens with crack, let's keep meth affordable, shall we?
And, incidentally, around here (the mountains of Georgia), teenagers and semi-random adults do make meth. Meth labs have replaced illegal stills. They just get their supplies from organized crime, or from other people who get it from organized crime, or at least mild-organized crime. You're right in that this idea of people buying large amounts of Sudafed and making it into meth is a bit silly...if people are buying large amount of Sudafed, they're just kids drinking it to get high. Meth is made from much 'purer' drugs that are usually either really stolen or 'stolen' with the help of doctors.
Because almost no one actually watches the movie, and thus almost no one realizes Bambi is a boy?
Actually, I have no idea on this one. I suspect there was some other famous Bambi between that Bambi and present day, but I do not know who. Bambi, at some point, became a stereotype name for an even-dumber Barbie, and it's kinda weird.
You, frankly, are a complete idiot.
Why? Because you can't lure prepubescents with porn, you twit.
There probably are sickos out there using terms children search on to lure them into something, although I have to point out that there are a hell of a lot fewer than them than people think there are, and most of them prey on children they have legitimate access to, not random kids they'd have to kidnap.
But, anyway...why the hell would they have porn on their page? Little kids do not want porn. And putting porn there is a great way to get some parent to notice what's going on.
The best way to lure a little kid would be to make an actual site about things kids were interested in, with a discussion board with private messaging or something.
The reason there are porn sites with 'child' keywords is that there does not exist a fetish so weird that it can't be marketed to. However, porn sites don't want children, either, and usually have ICRA ratings, which web browsers can block on.
No, you person with a reading comprehension problem, I'm saying a Senator is a Congressman. Senators are a subset of Congressmen. All members of the group 'Senator' are included in the group 'Congressmen'(1). There is no defination of 'Congressman' that excludes 'Senator' in any law or even tradition, and assuming 'Congressman' means 'Man who is in Congress', the Constution is quite clear on who is 'in Congress', even to the point of referencing to a group of both Representatives and Senators as 'Members of Congress'.
1) Or, obviously, Congresswomen, but that's an entirely different debate.