The great think about the SG1 premise is that you can have crazy maniacal over-the-top bad guys who've never read the Evil Overlord's list. They've been posing as Gods.
What's funny is that the show recognizes this. SG1 just make relentlessly makes fun of the bad guys insane drama-queenness.
And now it's time to point out that the Scottish, not Irish, actor, actually is Scottish, and doing his own accent. In fact, when he was up for the role, they were casting multiple nationalities for for it, and didn't care which they got. (The entire UN Security Council knows about the Stargate now. And Canada, cause, duh, they run half of NORAD.)
So he did his own, natural, accent. The only thing thing he's done is speak slower, at the director's request, because American's can't understand it when it's at normal speed.
You are both managing to be completely wrong, which is a neat trick.
Downloading an MP3 is legal. It's not legal because it's for 'personal use', whatever that is, it's legal because under copyright law, the only thing illegal is to copy the music (1). As you did not, in fact, make a copy, you are legal. (Once it gets to your computer, all you can do is space-shift it, which is certainly legal within a single computer system.)
It's the guy at the other end, who set up his computer to make copies on demand, that broke the law.
Think of it this way: If I photocopy a book, and stick copies of it outside of a store in a free newspaper rack, who just broke the law there. Me, duh. People who pick up the copies are fine. They didn't break the law, and they legally get to keep the copy, to boot(2). They, of course, still can't copy it without the copyright owner's permission. (I, OTOH, have to pay for each copy I gave away and couldn't get back to destroy.)
To recap: Downloading music from P2P networks is legal, if you don't share. (Well, techically you might be clear if you share but no one ever downloads from you, but I doubt it.)
1) Yes, yes, under copyright law, public performances are also illegal. That is not important here.
2) First person to say 'receiving stolen goods' will get kicked in the throat. While a lot of things are theft that people don't normally consider theft, copyright infringement ain't one of them, and this is one of the blatant ways it differs.
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In the US, it's legal for you to copy a CD onto a music CD-R and give it away to a friend without charging for it. (Technically, you couldn't even charge for the price of the media, but, duh, sell it to him beforehand, he can loan it back to you to put music on it.)
Music CD-Rs come with the music tax, that's the only way they differ from normal ones.
No, that would work if the players were suing based on something that Cryptic claimed to do, and wasn't doing, like getting rid of profane language.
But Cryptic telling players it will do X doesn't mean Marvel, a completely unrelated party, can use that against them.
Now, if someone playing Cryptic saved a screenshot, and put it on the net, and it happened to contain a likeness of a Marvel character, and Marvel sued him, then that user could go after Cryptic, because he had been harmed by Cryptic failing to do what it said, whereas he couldn't go after them if they hadn't said they were doing that.
But that sequence of events is rather improbable, and Cryptic probably feels that the risk of a lawsuit after they delete 'The Incredible Bulk' without having that as part of their EULA would be larger than that.
That said...you can't copyright a a superpower. If I were to start writing an Incredibly Bulk comic about a man dosed with muon radiation who, when he got angry, got larger, stronger, and blue, it's perfectly fine. (And I'm not even talking about a parody here, I'm talking serious.) You can copyright images of a character, you can to some extent copyright his backstory (But I doubt any of the characters on Heroes even have a boackstory.), and you can obviously trademark his name.
certainly can't copyright costumes. You can get trademarks on the symbols, but that's it. Outfits are absolutely not protected under copyright laws. I have no idea what Marvel is talking about.
The answer to that would be: No, I am not empowered to agree to contracts on behalf of the company, and thus I really don't feel empowered to agree to them and violate them at the same time!
Why don't you pirate it, Mr. Manager Man?
Don't put up with violating the law, or even violating company policy, to get around stupid-ass restrictions that are keeping you from doing your job. Stand firm and complain continually about the policy failure. If your company has a process to make suggestions or complain about policies, use it exactly how you're supposed to. When asked why you don't hit deadlines, pull out documentation of how this policy hindered you and you couldn't get it changed.
We, the workers, need to stop putting up with this crap. Either they give us the tools to do our job (Or let us go get them.), or we're just going to stand there and point out they've hired us to do a job and not given us the tools. Don't go and get the tools in violation of company policy.
A friend of mine got in a similiar sitution recently. It seems, he's on the IT staff of a company, and they'd adding computers. Well, for some completely idiotic reason, the electricians wire the network. So he put in a work order for eight drops in this room, and, three weeks later, when they came in, only two of the drops actually worked. So he's talking about what he's going to do, is is he going to get a hub and have reduced bandwidth to this important machines, or maybe stick some of them in another room until another work order goes this, or maybe, against the rules, take off the faceplates of the jacks and try to fix the wiring, or what, and I just stare at him.
Then I say: The electricians didn't do their job. They probably don't know how to do it correctly, so it's not their fault, it's the fault of whoever put in such a stupid-ass rule, but still...the work order is not complete. Don't try to figure out a way around the rules. Go and tell them you're only able to do 1/4th your job, because only 1/4th of the work you need done (And was okayed to be done!) was actually done. If they want this to not happen again, they could actually let people who know how to wire a network cable run it, or at least put the ends on.
Because figuring out ways around the rules is not your job. If the rules are not correct, yes, you need to point that out, and maybe even suggest new rules. If management does not listen to you, it is not your job to do your work in violation of said rules. If they make you sweep with a shovel instead of a broom, by God, sweep with a shovel. Don't sneak a broom out when they aren't looking.
Of course, companies could actually start trusting workers again, and I'm sure some do. But if they did, you'd know, because you wouldn't have stupid procedures you need to work around in the first place!
I think you're right about abortion. Roe vs. Wade is idiotic. If it hadn't passed, we'd have abortion legal almost everywhere. Instead, the religious right gets to whine and whine and whine about it, and never actually do anything. The politics of outrage require you get outraged against something you can't change, and the GOP knows that now. Get outraged about things you can change is a recipe for actually being expected to do stupid things, which is a losing preposition no matter what you do.
As for gay marriage, the constitution does say that you have to respect contracts in other states...but, hey, if they want to ignore each other's marriages, they are happy to do so. They did it with interracial marriages.
Interesting that everyone seems to forget that. There's plenty of precedent that it's legal to consider marriages made in other states not really marriages. Of course, it's rather obvious why the religious right hasn't brought this up as a solution, because it would draw attention to the fact that, yet again, they're calling bigotry 'moral issues'. Before, it was black men having sex with our wimmin, this time it's women having sex with our wimmin.
However, I think with the progess being made on banning gay marriage, or at least pretending to ban it, the GOP is finding itself having to do stupid things. Pretty soon some religions are going to go 'Hey, who put these guys in charge of marriage, anyway?'.
Heh, no, they were only planning on fighting one.;)
And, you know, the American people would have been okay with raised taxes after 9/11. Instead, they got lowered civil liberties and no tax change. Oh, wait, I forgot...they lowered taxes again, didn't they.
As for the GOP in congress in 94, I feel for them, I really do, except the 'slash government spending' crowd basically existed because of them. It was their issue, they created it, and created a bunch of cheerleaders for it, and then rode it into power.
And then people came to their senses and said 'Why, you want to cut [insert favorite program here]? You can't cut that, we need that!'. The entire situtation was basically the GOP's fault. It's what happens when you hype something that people wouldn't actually want to happen, and get people cheering for it...you'll be completely and utterly screwed if you ever get into a positition to do it. You don't do it, you'll anger those supporters, and look like a liar, you do it, and you'll anger everyone. The GOP took as good an exit as the middle ground allowed.
I think the Libertarian Party existed before that, to get back on topic, but that craziness managed to get a lot of Republicans believing that slashing government spending as much as possible was the way to go, so when the GOP left that platform behind, those people were left standing, confused, inside the Libertarian Party headquarters, where they were quickly handed a pamplet.
Luckily, the GOP now picks better things to get people riled up about, ones it can't do anything about, like those gays getting married, wimmin have abortions, and those athiests banning prayer in schools.
Welcome to the free market! Yes tobacco companies have a right to exist. Just as much as Grocery stores, and video game companies.
Your assertation that tobacco companies have the right to exist is just that, an assertation, with no evidence documentation, or even reasons. You just say it's so.
No company, in the US, has a right to exist. They exist because they benefit society by allowing large groups of people to work together. Tobacco companies do not benefit society, they wish to have more people addicted to cigarettes. If you feel having more cigarette addicts benefits society, than you are seriously confused.
If people want to buy and smoke tobacco it is their choice. They have a RIGHT to do so. The don't need to get a perscription or permission from the government or anything else. Their body belongs to them and it's their RIGHT to do whatever they want to it.
I, of course, never said that people didn't have the right to smoke. In fact, I explicitly said they do have that right. It's rather hard to imagine why I would have said we need to keep growing tobacco otherwise.
If they label that the product contains cocaine (even in the trace amounts they traditionally included), I have no problem with that. I also don't have a problem with cocaine's stronger form crack or opium or anything else for that matter. The goverment is supposed to protect my rights from external forces period. Telling me I can't start smoking if I choose to is silly.
And why would the government tell you that? It would do exactly what it's doing right now, tell you it's bad for you, and let you do it anyway, unless you're under 18. (In fact, my plan would let people smoke who can't right now, addicts under 18.)
Furthermore, the system most states use to control alchohol is corrupt, inefficient, and results in poor market choice. Doing that with tobacco is going to be 100x worse, and it WILL cost me money. Tobacco is a large employer of people. Many gas stations make much of their profit from tobacco, getting rid of that revenue stream is going to cause the price of other things to go up. It's also going to result in fewer people hired at those stations. Not to mention all of the people who make a living producing and distributing tobacco. The economic friction caused by all of those people having to find new jobs is going to cost me money; this doesn't even include government entitlements that those people are going to get.
And why, exactly, would gas stations stop selling tobacco? What the hell are you talking about?
I'll admit, under my plan, they'd hopefully sell less. As my plan is an attempt to get less smokers, I think that's fairly obvious.
As for the growers...duh, we'd still be growing tobacco, like I said. And presumably still shipping it around the country. If you think the government doing that instead of tobacco companies is somehow going to result in less jobs, I think you've seriously underestimated the ability of the government to waste money.
Also you are ignoring the social costs of black market effects which are far higher than whatever percieved social cost we bear because of smokers. Small black markets already exist because of the artifically high prices set by the government. All your idea is really going to accomplish is driving more people to them and increasing the power of the criminals who run it. Prohibition got us the mob, the war on drugs got us south american drug lords, and government run tobacco is going to get something a hell of a lot worse. How do you plan to deal with this? Will you do what some places did and have "fines"? That's just going to get amortized as a cost of doing business and result in bribes and corruption to the police. Are you going to criminalize it? That's going to cause a rise in violent crime and make the drug trade look tame.
Ah. The infamous black market. So, um, why would we have it again? Tobacc
She, technically, shouldn't have been allowed within 100 feet of the voting area, much less voting, if wherever you're talking about has similiar laws to Georgia.
You're not allowed to campaign at a voting area. At all. It's not allowed. People should be able to vote without having to put up with it, or feel intimidated because everyone else is wearing a certain t-shirt, or telling them if they don't vote for X than the economy will fail, or maybe every bad things will personally happen to them when they leave...
Yes, it's harse, but there's a reason for it. You had months to show support. You can still stand 100 feet away and campaign during the vote. But there's supposed to be a magical void around the vote area where no one tries to influence anyone, so that people don't feel pressured.
Well, there are a lot of complete morons out there who rant and rave about tax-and-spend liberals and vote Republican because of that, completely missing the point that the Republicans have become borrow-and-spend.
(Please note I didn't call all Republican voters idiots, just ones who voted for them because they promised to (and did) lower taxes. Lowering taxes and raising spending is worse than raising taxes and raising spending.)
You are correct, the Republican party has managed to get as far away as possible from the Libertarian party, very very recently. Which is, of course, why the LP is asking for a recount of Ohio...they disagree with Kerry on 50% of his platform, but they disagree nearly completely with Bush.
They can refuse the votes if there's two sets of electors. At which point they follow various rules to figure out which one is correct, and throw the other set out.
That may, indeed, be a nice logical reason for fighting a war on terror. It has almost nothing to do with what the US as a nation is actually doing, which most recently was invading Iraq on fabricated evidence in an invasion that was planned before the attacks, but actually fighting terrorism would be nice and logical...except...
The 'being killed without their consent' is gibberish. Oh, sure, most people who die from smoking are people who have chosen to take that risk, although it would be interesting to see, of those 400,000 a year, exactly how many die from secondhand smoke or contracted illnesses from a time when the tobacco companies were delibrately lying about the dangers of smoking. I don't have any statistics, but I'll guess it's at least 4000 a year.
However, there are quite a lot of things that kill people without their consent and kill at least 4000 a year.
One that hits it dead on is Hepatitis B. It kills 4000 a year in the US, via liver disease, and infects a lot more. (In addition, it's the final disease of quite a few more AIDS victims, but, obviously, getting rid of Hepatitis B would just mean they die of something else. Those are counted as AIDS deaths, and aren't in the 4000.)
And, of course, there is a vaccine. The vaccine sells for between $75 and $165, so I'll assume the government could make it for $50 if it made it for everyone. 300 million americans, so that's 15 billion dollars. Maybe $20 billion. (Ignoring the people with it already, which is a surprisingly large amount of the population. And people who already had the vaccine.)
As a bonus, unlike stopping smoking, absolutely no one can take offense. Absolutely no one has an incentive to keep Hepatitis B around. The vaccine's not even patented, so the drug companies don't really lose out, the lowest bidders just gets to make all their profits now instead of over time.
The war on terror has cost, what, four times that already? And Bin Laden's still out there talking trash about our mamma.
Saying 'We're doing this to save lives.' just doesn't work. And since we've all got the heroic images of firefighters in mind, I have to point out that a disproportional amount of Hepatitis B infections are to emergency workers who get it while trying to stop someone from bleeding to death.
I'll also mention that I picked a disease name at random and googled it to find all this out, and I'm sure there are plenty of best examples, this was just the second, after tuberculosis, which apparently doesn't have a very good vaccine. I'm sure if I'd keep going I would have found diseases that kill more and have cheaper vaccines.
And now you can read my post, and try to figure out where I said anything whatsoever about not letting people smoke.
Oh, wait. I didn't.
Well, at least I said something about taking your money to stop people from smoking.
Oh, wait. I didn't.
All I said was we should stop allowing tobacco companies to, basically, exist at all. Tobacco companies are scum. We can do it the nice way and buy out their assets, or we can just declare private manufacture of tobacco illegal and watch them crumple.
We obviously need to keep growing tobacco for addicts (And, no matter what we do, we'll get new users, so it's not likely we can ever stop this.), and we should use all money from that to try to stop smoking.
This wouldn't affect non-smokers at all. No extra taxes, no extra laws, no nothing.
Smokers would get exactly what they're used to, except we'd want to slowly back off the amount of nicotine and just plain nasty chemicals in the cigarettes. (Because, you see, we have no incentive to addict them.) And they'd get free patches (Well, they already paid for them via cigarette taxes.) to quit.
No one would be advertising tobacco. I'd prefer, if you wanted to buy it, you had to go to at least a little trouble, maybe an hour or two, to originally get a prescription. Once you got one you could purchase however much you wanted forever, but it would be a barrier to new users. (And we need to deter resell, but not a lot, because, frankly, there'd be no profit in it anyway.) As a bonus, if all people are required to have a slip to purchase tobacco, everyone gets carded! (And, in my most unpopular move yet, I'd let teenagers have permission to purchase it if a doctor says they're addicted.)
Frankly, the only logical objection to this plan would be people who think tobacco companies have some sort of inherit right to exist. Anyone who thinks so better damn well have an explanation of why Coca-Cola shouldn't be allowed to put cocaine in their drinks, by the same logic.
In case anyone's wondering, I feel the same way about very addictive illegal drugs as I do about tobacco. Outlawing them is insanely stupid, and allowing private selling of them is also insanely stupid. We need to create a system that gives existing addicts access to them with as few new ones as possible.
What I like is the OSD (on-screen display) plugin. It sticks up one of those bright green messages like the kind you get on TV, VCRs, and even some laptops, telling what song you've just switched to.
And it's completely customizable, so if you do have a laptop with said messages, you cna make it match them, style-wise.
I was actually about to suggest foobar2000 myself. I use it all the time, I love it.
Why? Because it doesn't use a stupid ass interface. I hate winamp's interface. Yeah, let's waste space mimicing a fricking physical player. And while we're at it, why don't we draw a big pencil around the screen to write?
foobar2000 sits in the taskbar, and has global hotkeys to flip around with. If I want to do something the hotkeys can't handle, I can bring it up...it's just one window, a tabbed playlist window, where adding and deleting files is very intuitive. It actually maximizes logically, so I can see everything. I can have dozens of playlists on the top, all nice in a row. All the buttons on Winamp's main window take up a good 15x300 block in the menubar.
Winamp, in contrast, wants you to bring up extra windows to manage your song list, when that is, in fact, the only reason you need a media player in the first place. And, of course, the list is this tiny thing...hey, windows already has a perfectly good list control, with columns and everything.
I don't give a rat's ass about how pretty it looks, because 99.9999% of the time, I can't see the damn thing anyway. Do people really sit around and have winamp cover up a third of their screen while using their computer? Somehow I doubt it.
The only thing foobar2000 is lacking is easy access to the EQ. I'm sure there's a plugin somewhere for that.
That said, foobar2000 does apparently have some skins plugin you can use.
Yes, that infared trick was great 5 years ago. But as IR doesn't actually improve the quality of a projected image, all professional screeners have cover it up, or even electronically disabled it, to keep from being detected that way.
There is something that kills about 400 thousand Americans each year. We're talking 100 times 9/11, and you don't have to be silly and average it out over half a century.
In fact, if you just take the week of 9/11, it killed about twice as many that week alone.
And, statistically, one person who died in the tower would have died anyway, of this killer, before 2002, which was two and a half months away. (It kills slightly more than 1 out of a 1000 people a year.)
It is, of course, smoking. (Duh.)
If the government were truly serious about saving people's lives, it could come up with some serious ways to stop people from starting to smoke, and help them quit. I'm not talking silly ads, I'm talking about things like nationalizing tobacco selling, putting all the profits back into helping people quit. Eventually, they could figure out a way to only sell to people who were actually addicted to them, so the only way to start would be to bum a cigarette off someone else.
Before people start making all sorts of crazy assumptions about how I hate smokers, I mention that I think it's absurd we make cigarette smokers stand around outside to smoke, which should instantly demolish most of your assumptions about where I stand. I just also think it's absurd we're still letting the tobacco industry operate as a business. It shouldn't be. We should simply grow tobacco to provide for addicts. (I'd also like prices to go down a little, but you have to weigh the deterrent prices against how much spending all that money hurts the addicts. Maybe a sliding scale, where it's very expensive at first and then drops.)
Yes, that's kinda off topic here, but, seriously, we've fighting a war on terror for four thousand people, I thought we should have some perspective here about what's really killing Americans that the government could do something about. Yes, some diseases kill more, but we don't have any magic solution to those things, and throwing money at them is basically rolling the dice. Whereas we know people would stop dying if they stopped smoking.
You're an ignorant little dupe of the vending machine industry. They're making billions by killing Americans, and they have machines sitting in PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
We shouldn't invade other countries without UN support. However, we shouldn't have stopped in Iraq just because Saddam said 'Okay, I give, you can have back Kuwait'. The UN should not have agreed to any peace agreement that left Saddam in power or the government intact, and if they did, we should have kept going. (Yes, he'd still offer peace, if peace meant banishment from Iraq instead of rotting in a jail.)
So, in a way, I agree with everything the hawk loons have been saying...Saddam was not someone we should have in power in Iraq. But we can't go invading countries without an excuse. (And, no, we can't just invent the excuse ourselves, either.)
Once we got in there, though, we shouldn't have left until he was gone...and we could have even done it legally without UN support.
See, if a country starts a civil war itself, either side can ask for help, and we could have helped. We were this close to starting a civil war there, and we had already promised to help, when suddenly we folds, backed out, and left all the insurgents to be tortured to death. We could have easily started a 'civil war', we'd done it enough times before, and this time it would have been very short and very just.
Instead, we waited ten fucking years and went back in on an absurd pretext, and we did it when we should have been working in Afghanistan and actually fighting terrorist organizations. And the absolutely horrible timing of it created more terrorists! If we'd gone all the way a decade ago, the Iraqis would like us more, and the terorists wouldn't care...they didn't like Iraq anyway.
Hell, I hate to suggest it, but a new, secular run Iraq with strong ties to the US would be a much more convinent target for terrorists than the US...
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What's funny is that the show recognizes this. SG1 just make relentlessly makes fun of the bad guys insane drama-queenness.
So he did his own, natural, accent. The only thing thing he's done is speak slower, at the director's request, because American's can't understand it when it's at normal speed.
Downloading an MP3 is legal. It's not legal because it's for 'personal use', whatever that is, it's legal because under copyright law, the only thing illegal is to copy the music (1). As you did not, in fact, make a copy, you are legal. (Once it gets to your computer, all you can do is space-shift it, which is certainly legal within a single computer system.)
It's the guy at the other end, who set up his computer to make copies on demand, that broke the law.
Think of it this way: If I photocopy a book, and stick copies of it outside of a store in a free newspaper rack, who just broke the law there. Me, duh. People who pick up the copies are fine. They didn't break the law, and they legally get to keep the copy, to boot(2). They, of course, still can't copy it without the copyright owner's permission. (I, OTOH, have to pay for each copy I gave away and couldn't get back to destroy.)
To recap: Downloading music from P2P networks is legal, if you don't share. (Well, techically you might be clear if you share but no one ever downloads from you, but I doubt it.)
1) Yes, yes, under copyright law, public performances are also illegal. That is not important here.
2) First person to say 'receiving stolen goods' will get kicked in the throat. While a lot of things are theft that people don't normally consider theft, copyright infringement ain't one of them, and this is one of the blatant ways it differs.
Music CD-Rs come with the music tax, that's the only way they differ from normal ones.
But Cryptic telling players it will do X doesn't mean Marvel, a completely unrelated party, can use that against them.
Now, if someone playing Cryptic saved a screenshot, and put it on the net, and it happened to contain a likeness of a Marvel character, and Marvel sued him, then that user could go after Cryptic, because he had been harmed by Cryptic failing to do what it said, whereas he couldn't go after them if they hadn't said they were doing that.
But that sequence of events is rather improbable, and Cryptic probably feels that the risk of a lawsuit after they delete 'The Incredible Bulk' without having that as part of their EULA would be larger than that.
That said...you can't copyright a a superpower. If I were to start writing an Incredibly Bulk comic about a man dosed with muon radiation who, when he got angry, got larger, stronger, and blue, it's perfectly fine. (And I'm not even talking about a parody here, I'm talking serious.) You can copyright images of a character, you can to some extent copyright his backstory (But I doubt any of the characters on Heroes even have a boackstory.), and you can obviously trademark his name.
certainly can't copyright costumes. You can get trademarks on the symbols, but that's it. Outfits are absolutely not protected under copyright laws. I have no idea what Marvel is talking about.
It was called Asia. The bridge to it sunk.
Why don't you pirate it, Mr. Manager Man?
Don't put up with violating the law, or even violating company policy, to get around stupid-ass restrictions that are keeping you from doing your job. Stand firm and complain continually about the policy failure. If your company has a process to make suggestions or complain about policies, use it exactly how you're supposed to. When asked why you don't hit deadlines, pull out documentation of how this policy hindered you and you couldn't get it changed.
We, the workers, need to stop putting up with this crap. Either they give us the tools to do our job (Or let us go get them.), or we're just going to stand there and point out they've hired us to do a job and not given us the tools. Don't go and get the tools in violation of company policy.
A friend of mine got in a similiar sitution recently. It seems, he's on the IT staff of a company, and they'd adding computers. Well, for some completely idiotic reason, the electricians wire the network. So he put in a work order for eight drops in this room, and, three weeks later, when they came in, only two of the drops actually worked. So he's talking about what he's going to do, is is he going to get a hub and have reduced bandwidth to this important machines, or maybe stick some of them in another room until another work order goes this, or maybe, against the rules, take off the faceplates of the jacks and try to fix the wiring, or what, and I just stare at him.
Then I say: The electricians didn't do their job. They probably don't know how to do it correctly, so it's not their fault, it's the fault of whoever put in such a stupid-ass rule, but still...the work order is not complete. Don't try to figure out a way around the rules. Go and tell them you're only able to do 1/4th your job, because only 1/4th of the work you need done (And was okayed to be done!) was actually done. If they want this to not happen again, they could actually let people who know how to wire a network cable run it, or at least put the ends on.
Because figuring out ways around the rules is not your job. If the rules are not correct, yes, you need to point that out, and maybe even suggest new rules. If management does not listen to you, it is not your job to do your work in violation of said rules. If they make you sweep with a shovel instead of a broom, by God, sweep with a shovel. Don't sneak a broom out when they aren't looking.
Of course, companies could actually start trusting workers again, and I'm sure some do. But if they did, you'd know, because you wouldn't have stupid procedures you need to work around in the first place!
As for gay marriage, the constitution does say that you have to respect contracts in other states...but, hey, if they want to ignore each other's marriages, they are happy to do so. They did it with interracial marriages.
Interesting that everyone seems to forget that. There's plenty of precedent that it's legal to consider marriages made in other states not really marriages. Of course, it's rather obvious why the religious right hasn't brought this up as a solution, because it would draw attention to the fact that, yet again, they're calling bigotry 'moral issues'. Before, it was black men having sex with our wimmin, this time it's women having sex with our wimmin.
However, I think with the progess being made on banning gay marriage, or at least pretending to ban it, the GOP is finding itself having to do stupid things. Pretty soon some religions are going to go 'Hey, who put these guys in charge of marriage, anyway?'.
And, you know, the American people would have been okay with raised taxes after 9/11. Instead, they got lowered civil liberties and no tax change. Oh, wait, I forgot...they lowered taxes again, didn't they.
As for the GOP in congress in 94, I feel for them, I really do, except the 'slash government spending' crowd basically existed because of them. It was their issue, they created it, and created a bunch of cheerleaders for it, and then rode it into power.
And then people came to their senses and said 'Why, you want to cut [insert favorite program here]? You can't cut that, we need that!'. The entire situtation was basically the GOP's fault. It's what happens when you hype something that people wouldn't actually want to happen, and get people cheering for it...you'll be completely and utterly screwed if you ever get into a positition to do it. You don't do it, you'll anger those supporters, and look like a liar, you do it, and you'll anger everyone. The GOP took as good an exit as the middle ground allowed.
I think the Libertarian Party existed before that, to get back on topic, but that craziness managed to get a lot of Republicans believing that slashing government spending as much as possible was the way to go, so when the GOP left that platform behind, those people were left standing, confused, inside the Libertarian Party headquarters, where they were quickly handed a pamplet.
Luckily, the GOP now picks better things to get people riled up about, ones it can't do anything about, like those gays getting married, wimmin have abortions, and those athiests banning prayer in schools.
Welcome to the free market! Yes tobacco companies have a right to exist. Just as much as Grocery stores, and video game companies.
Your assertation that tobacco companies have the right to exist is just that, an assertation, with no evidence documentation, or even reasons. You just say it's so.
No company, in the US, has a right to exist. They exist because they benefit society by allowing large groups of people to work together. Tobacco companies do not benefit society, they wish to have more people addicted to cigarettes. If you feel having more cigarette addicts benefits society, than you are seriously confused.
If people want to buy and smoke tobacco it is their choice. They have a RIGHT to do so. The don't need to get a perscription or permission from the government or anything else. Their body belongs to them and it's their RIGHT to do whatever they want to it.
I, of course, never said that people didn't have the right to smoke. In fact, I explicitly said they do have that right. It's rather hard to imagine why I would have said we need to keep growing tobacco otherwise.
If they label that the product contains cocaine (even in the trace amounts they traditionally included), I have no problem with that. I also don't have a problem with cocaine's stronger form crack or opium or anything else for that matter. The goverment is supposed to protect my rights from external forces period. Telling me I can't start smoking if I choose to is silly.
And why would the government tell you that? It would do exactly what it's doing right now, tell you it's bad for you, and let you do it anyway, unless you're under 18. (In fact, my plan would let people smoke who can't right now, addicts under 18.)
Furthermore, the system most states use to control alchohol is corrupt, inefficient, and results in poor market choice. Doing that with tobacco is going to be 100x worse, and it WILL cost me money. Tobacco is a large employer of people. Many gas stations make much of their profit from tobacco, getting rid of that revenue stream is going to cause the price of other things to go up. It's also going to result in fewer people hired at those stations. Not to mention all of the people who make a living producing and distributing tobacco. The economic friction caused by all of those people having to find new jobs is going to cost me money; this doesn't even include government entitlements that those people are going to get.
And why, exactly, would gas stations stop selling tobacco? What the hell are you talking about?
I'll admit, under my plan, they'd hopefully sell less. As my plan is an attempt to get less smokers, I think that's fairly obvious.
As for the growers...duh, we'd still be growing tobacco, like I said. And presumably still shipping it around the country. If you think the government doing that instead of tobacco companies is somehow going to result in less jobs, I think you've seriously underestimated the ability of the government to waste money.
Also you are ignoring the social costs of black market effects which are far higher than whatever percieved social cost we bear because of smokers. Small black markets already exist because of the artifically high prices set by the government. All your idea is really going to accomplish is driving more people to them and increasing the power of the criminals who run it. Prohibition got us the mob, the war on drugs got us south american drug lords, and government run tobacco is going to get something a hell of a lot worse. How do you plan to deal with this? Will you do what some places did and have "fines"? That's just going to get amortized as a cost of doing business and result in bribes and corruption to the police. Are you going to criminalize it? That's going to cause a rise in violent crime and make the drug trade look tame.
Ah. The infamous black market. So, um, why would we have it again? Tobacc
However, we're certainly unlikely to get more votes off them in a recount.
You're not allowed to campaign at a voting area. At all. It's not allowed. People should be able to vote without having to put up with it, or feel intimidated because everyone else is wearing a certain t-shirt, or telling them if they don't vote for X than the economy will fail, or maybe every bad things will personally happen to them when they leave...
Yes, it's harse, but there's a reason for it. You had months to show support. You can still stand 100 feet away and campaign during the vote. But there's supposed to be a magical void around the vote area where no one tries to influence anyone, so that people don't feel pressured.
(Please note I didn't call all Republican voters idiots, just ones who voted for them because they promised to (and did) lower taxes. Lowering taxes and raising spending is worse than raising taxes and raising spending.)
You are correct, the Republican party has managed to get as far away as possible from the Libertarian party, very very recently. Which is, of course, why the LP is asking for a recount of Ohio...they disagree with Kerry on 50% of his platform, but they disagree nearly completely with Bush.
Real libertarians want the government to get out of the institute of marriage.
They can refuse the votes if there's two sets of electors. At which point they follow various rules to figure out which one is correct, and throw the other set out.
The 'being killed without their consent' is gibberish. Oh, sure, most people who die from smoking are people who have chosen to take that risk, although it would be interesting to see, of those 400,000 a year, exactly how many die from secondhand smoke or contracted illnesses from a time when the tobacco companies were delibrately lying about the dangers of smoking. I don't have any statistics, but I'll guess it's at least 4000 a year.
However, there are quite a lot of things that kill people without their consent and kill at least 4000 a year.
One that hits it dead on is Hepatitis B. It kills 4000 a year in the US, via liver disease, and infects a lot more. (In addition, it's the final disease of quite a few more AIDS victims, but, obviously, getting rid of Hepatitis B would just mean they die of something else. Those are counted as AIDS deaths, and aren't in the 4000.)
And, of course, there is a vaccine. The vaccine sells for between $75 and $165, so I'll assume the government could make it for $50 if it made it for everyone. 300 million americans, so that's 15 billion dollars. Maybe $20 billion. (Ignoring the people with it already, which is a surprisingly large amount of the population. And people who already had the vaccine.)
As a bonus, unlike stopping smoking, absolutely no one can take offense. Absolutely no one has an incentive to keep Hepatitis B around. The vaccine's not even patented, so the drug companies don't really lose out, the lowest bidders just gets to make all their profits now instead of over time.
The war on terror has cost, what, four times that already? And Bin Laden's still out there talking trash about our mamma.
Saying 'We're doing this to save lives.' just doesn't work. And since we've all got the heroic images of firefighters in mind, I have to point out that a disproportional amount of Hepatitis B infections are to emergency workers who get it while trying to stop someone from bleeding to death.
I'll also mention that I picked a disease name at random and googled it to find all this out, and I'm sure there are plenty of best examples, this was just the second, after tuberculosis, which apparently doesn't have a very good vaccine. I'm sure if I'd keep going I would have found diseases that kill more and have cheaper vaccines.
Oh, wait. I didn't.
Well, at least I said something about taking your money to stop people from smoking.
Oh, wait. I didn't.
All I said was we should stop allowing tobacco companies to, basically, exist at all. Tobacco companies are scum. We can do it the nice way and buy out their assets, or we can just declare private manufacture of tobacco illegal and watch them crumple.
We obviously need to keep growing tobacco for addicts (And, no matter what we do, we'll get new users, so it's not likely we can ever stop this.), and we should use all money from that to try to stop smoking.
This wouldn't affect non-smokers at all. No extra taxes, no extra laws, no nothing.
Smokers would get exactly what they're used to, except we'd want to slowly back off the amount of nicotine and just plain nasty chemicals in the cigarettes. (Because, you see, we have no incentive to addict them.) And they'd get free patches (Well, they already paid for them via cigarette taxes.) to quit.
No one would be advertising tobacco. I'd prefer, if you wanted to buy it, you had to go to at least a little trouble, maybe an hour or two, to originally get a prescription. Once you got one you could purchase however much you wanted forever, but it would be a barrier to new users. (And we need to deter resell, but not a lot, because, frankly, there'd be no profit in it anyway.) As a bonus, if all people are required to have a slip to purchase tobacco, everyone gets carded! (And, in my most unpopular move yet, I'd let teenagers have permission to purchase it if a doctor says they're addicted.)
Frankly, the only logical objection to this plan would be people who think tobacco companies have some sort of inherit right to exist. Anyone who thinks so better damn well have an explanation of why Coca-Cola shouldn't be allowed to put cocaine in their drinks, by the same logic.
In case anyone's wondering, I feel the same way about very addictive illegal drugs as I do about tobacco. Outlawing them is insanely stupid, and allowing private selling of them is also insanely stupid. We need to create a system that gives existing addicts access to them with as few new ones as possible.
And it's completely customizable, so if you do have a laptop with said messages, you cna make it match them, style-wise.
Why? Because it doesn't use a stupid ass interface. I hate winamp's interface. Yeah, let's waste space mimicing a fricking physical player. And while we're at it, why don't we draw a big pencil around the screen to write?
foobar2000 sits in the taskbar, and has global hotkeys to flip around with. If I want to do something the hotkeys can't handle, I can bring it up...it's just one window, a tabbed playlist window, where adding and deleting files is very intuitive. It actually maximizes logically, so I can see everything. I can have dozens of playlists on the top, all nice in a row. All the buttons on Winamp's main window take up a good 15x300 block in the menubar.
Winamp, in contrast, wants you to bring up extra windows to manage your song list, when that is, in fact, the only reason you need a media player in the first place. And, of course, the list is this tiny thing...hey, windows already has a perfectly good list control, with columns and everything.
I don't give a rat's ass about how pretty it looks, because 99.9999% of the time, I can't see the damn thing anyway. Do people really sit around and have winamp cover up a third of their screen while using their computer? Somehow I doubt it.
The only thing foobar2000 is lacking is easy access to the EQ. I'm sure there's a plugin somewhere for that.
That said, foobar2000 does apparently have some skins plugin you can use.
As an analogy, we could use, I don't know, people or something.
Yes, that infared trick was great 5 years ago. But as IR doesn't actually improve the quality of a projected image, all professional screeners have cover it up, or even electronically disabled it, to keep from being detected that way.
There is something that kills about 400 thousand Americans each year. We're talking 100 times 9/11, and you don't have to be silly and average it out over half a century.
In fact, if you just take the week of 9/11, it killed about twice as many that week alone.
And, statistically, one person who died in the tower would have died anyway, of this killer, before 2002, which was two and a half months away. (It kills slightly more than 1 out of a 1000 people a year.)
It is, of course, smoking. (Duh.)
If the government were truly serious about saving people's lives, it could come up with some serious ways to stop people from starting to smoke, and help them quit. I'm not talking silly ads, I'm talking about things like nationalizing tobacco selling, putting all the profits back into helping people quit. Eventually, they could figure out a way to only sell to people who were actually addicted to them, so the only way to start would be to bum a cigarette off someone else.
Before people start making all sorts of crazy assumptions about how I hate smokers, I mention that I think it's absurd we make cigarette smokers stand around outside to smoke, which should instantly demolish most of your assumptions about where I stand. I just also think it's absurd we're still letting the tobacco industry operate as a business. It shouldn't be. We should simply grow tobacco to provide for addicts. (I'd also like prices to go down a little, but you have to weigh the deterrent prices against how much spending all that money hurts the addicts. Maybe a sliding scale, where it's very expensive at first and then drops.)
Yes, that's kinda off topic here, but, seriously, we've fighting a war on terror for four thousand people, I thought we should have some perspective here about what's really killing Americans that the government could do something about. Yes, some diseases kill more, but we don't have any magic solution to those things, and throwing money at them is basically rolling the dice. Whereas we know people would stop dying if they stopped smoking.
DOESN'T ANYONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?!
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We shouldn't invade other countries without UN support. However, we shouldn't have stopped in Iraq just because Saddam said 'Okay, I give, you can have back Kuwait'. The UN should not have agreed to any peace agreement that left Saddam in power or the government intact, and if they did, we should have kept going. (Yes, he'd still offer peace, if peace meant banishment from Iraq instead of rotting in a jail.)
So, in a way, I agree with everything the hawk loons have been saying...Saddam was not someone we should have in power in Iraq. But we can't go invading countries without an excuse. (And, no, we can't just invent the excuse ourselves, either.)
Once we got in there, though, we shouldn't have left until he was gone...and we could have even done it legally without UN support.
See, if a country starts a civil war itself, either side can ask for help, and we could have helped. We were this close to starting a civil war there, and we had already promised to help, when suddenly we folds, backed out, and left all the insurgents to be tortured to death. We could have easily started a 'civil war', we'd done it enough times before, and this time it would have been very short and very just.
Instead, we waited ten fucking years and went back in on an absurd pretext, and we did it when we should have been working in Afghanistan and actually fighting terrorist organizations. And the absolutely horrible timing of it created more terrorists! If we'd gone all the way a decade ago, the Iraqis would like us more, and the terorists wouldn't care...they didn't like Iraq anyway.
Hell, I hate to suggest it, but a new, secular run Iraq with strong ties to the US would be a much more convinent target for terrorists than the US...