Dude, the layman has no idea how science works at all.
Almost no one in this country can even give an brief summary of the scientific method. Almost no one knows how science works at all, in any manner. They can't give any explanation of what scientists actually do or how they do it.
Complaining about the Mythbuster's lack of rigor is like complaining about how teaching Maxwell's equations ignores quantum effects.
And I'll point out that science doesn't require rigor. Or, more specifically, it requires as much rigor as the field requires. As the Mythbusters are operating in their own field of 'urban legend', perhaps that field has exactly as much rigor as that field wants.
You want more rigor, you start doing scientific research in that field and start complaining about their lack of rigor, until then, shut up...you don't get to define how much rigor is needed for random field of science. Different fields have different accepted standards. Until some distinguished 'urban legend' institutions start criticizing their lack of rigor, and stops using their results, they have enough.
75% of American Jews think (correctly) that the goal of Arabs is the destruction of Israel.
Wow, EPIC READING COMPREHENSION FAIL.
That question was if this was true: 'The goal of the Arabs is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel.'
I.e, it's about Palestine, you nimrod.
Wrong. 75% of American Jews think (correctly) that the goal of Arabs is the destruction of Israel. Majority supports a US strike against Iran.
Yes, one day ahead of talks that were all over the news about Iran's nuclear program, 56% of American Jews managed to be for a strike. Wow, way to barely eek a majority there.
But did I say 'almost two years ago'? I do not believe I did.
Here's a more recent poll showing American Jews don't give a flying fuck about Iran.
Majority oppose calls on Israel to freeze settlement building.
And I said what about that?
That's just semantics. A head of state saying that another state should disappear from the pages of history is as threatening as it gets.
Really? As threatening as it gets?
More threatening then threatening to attack it? You know, like Israel's doing to Iran?
Perhaps you should check and see what 'semantics' means. He's not actually threatened Israel. Ever. At not point has he said 'Israel must do X, or we will attack it.'
Israel has. The US has. Get the goddamn plank out of your eye before condemning a country that, at the most evil, publicly wishes Israel to collapse.
He also finances a variety of anti-Israel militant groups,
No, he doesn't.
denies holocaust
Which makes him an asshole but doesn't make him magically at war with Israel.
and has said in numerous statements that any Arab country that accepts existence of Israel is a traitor to the Muslim world.
Hey, you know that statement you just made up about 'any Arab country that accepts existence of Israel is a traitor to the Muslim world'? Yeah, it's not on that page.
Maybe you should read the fucking page you just linked to. It shows a lot of hatred towards Israel, and a lot of insults towards Zionism, and even a revisionist history. It shows a lot of claims that Israel is going to die, that the peace process is functionally dead.
What it doesn't have is any sort of threat towards Israel whatsoever, except a deliberate mistranslation.
In any case, all this is argument over unimportant details. Do you really doubt that if the day comes when Arab countries and Iran have the power to destroy Israel that they will hesitate for even one second?
Yes, I do think they'd 'hesitate', you goddamn imbecile, because most Middle East countries that invade other countries have done it with the expectation of our support. Iran hasn't fucking attacked anyone since India, before the British conquered it.
You're trying to paint them as goddamn belligerent punch-throwing crazy people, when they've done literally nothing to get such a reputation. Nothing. Ever. You've made up their entire reputation.
I said the other two are 'inarguable' because I simply didn't feel like arguing that Standard Oil wasn't caused by 'government interference'...but I guess I'll have to make that argument:
All monopolies are, strictly speaking, caused by 'government interference', because all corporations are caused by government interference. They don't exist otherwise. Which is what makes the 'no monopoly exists naturally, it's all caused by the government interfering in the free market' claim so stupid.
The Standard Oil monopoly existed because of perfectly normal land ownership laws. There was no 'government interference' for the railroads, they had no magical special rights to do stuff to their land.
Granted, they owned that land because the government eminent domained it, and sold it to them, but there is absolutely no reason that the railroads, or the oil companies for that matter, couldn't have bought enough land to stop competing shipments.
There might be a few people who refused to sell, but it's much easier to block something than to actually build something. You have to have an unbroken line to build, you can zig-zag to block. And considering that Standard Oil wouldn't need to build a pipeline anyway, they can bid more, and people are more likely to sell to them than their competitors. (Of course, in this hypothetical universe we have no functioning rail system, so I guess they would need to build something.)
All corporations have 'government interference' in their past, which is incredibly handy for libertarians when trying to explain why they're monopolies. Sadly for them, in almost all cases the monopoly could have happened just as easily without government interference, or the 'government interference' is something that everything relies on, like private property laws or railroads.
Guess what? If we didn't have private property laws, that evil 'government interference in the market', we wouldn't have monopolies either.
I actually entirely agree with you, but you shouldn't present it that way, as it will be taken as antisemitism, and isn't fair to ascribe to 'Jews'. Jews in the US are actually mostly on the left, and antiwar.
This mistaken belief that 'Jews' support Israel doing whatever it wants is due to the Israeli lobby in US, which like to claim that all Jews think the way it does. Which isn't true in the US or Israeli.
Most Jews, in both the US and Israel, are nowhere near as hostile to Muslim countries as the Israeli lobby tries to pretend is 'necessary for Israel's defense'. Most Jews in the US don't care about any of those warmongering issues at all, and Jews in Israel care about Palestine and maybe Lebanon. Not Iran. In fact, Israelis are much less likely to think Iran will attack Israel than Americans.
The neocon right in the US, the hardliners in Israel, and fanatic Muslim leaders, all have incentive to present Israel, supported by the US, at war with the Muslim world. They are all lying goddamn warmongers manipulating every out-of-context quote(1) and event(2) and wishing for an all-out war in the Middle East. Do not help them in any way. Don't assume 'Jews' actually want this.
1) No, the leader of Iran doesn't want to wipe Israel off the map, he wishes it would, in an analogy he made in every speech except the one time he didn't further explain it, disappear like the USSR. Yet warmongers here distorted that into a threat of nuclear annihilation.
2) And no, Qu'ran burning is not encouraged or even condoned by the US government, it was actually condemned. It's just, in the US, the government has no power to stop any display of religion. Yet warmongers in Yemen distorted that into an official government act.
More to the point, when did it become a state matter? It's a Federal issue! The Georgia police, state or local, can't do anything about copyright infringement. The FBI handles that.
It's entirely possible that the college meant they were informing the FBI, but they really sound like they think they should be turning in tips to the local police, who will very quickly inform them than they don't give a flying fuck about copyright infringement and 'if you keep bothering us with tips about things that are not actually crimes we'll have you arrested'.
Alright, some particularly stupid police officer who (say) didn't like students, might ignore all this *once* but it would soon turn into a media story + malicious prosecution suits + police wasting time etc., the EFF would probably get involved (with money etc.) and the college policy (the automatic report to police bit anyhow) would stop right there.
No, the police can't 'charge' people with crimes. They can arrest people on suspicion on crimes for up to 48 hours, (or, hell, arrest them without any stated reason.) but actually charging them is the job of the district attorney, who has to look at the evidence and sign off on an arrest warrant.
And DAs don't do stupid shit like that, because they are, tada, elected, and care about their win/loss ratio, and especially don't want exceptionally stupid cases filed that will make them look stupid at the next election.
And felonies, which I'm not sure this is, require more than that, the DA can't even go directly to trial, first he has to go to a grand jury and get them to agree that the case has enough evidence to have a trial.
Strictly speaking, anyone can go the grand jury and give them evidence and they can write an arrest warrant, for any crime, even misdemeanors. It is entirely possible to have someone convicted of a crime without the DA or police being involved at all, although it gets tricky trying to arrest them. And this has actually happened, google 'runaway grand juries', including a instance or two where the grand jury decided that the DA was in on it and charged them also. (That must be awkward for the police: 'Hey, here's that evidence in the Franklin case, I think we have enough to charge him. Can you sign off on it and we'll get it to the grand jury? Oh, and speaking of the grand jury...here's an arrest warrant from them, and, long story short, you're under arrest.')
Not that any of this is relevant, as copyright violation isn't illegal under Georgia law, and hence the Georgia police, either local or state, the DA, and/or the grand jury, would do fuck-all about reports someone was committing it, and if you kept wasting their time with those reports after being told it wasn't a state issue, you'd be charged with deliberately wasting the police or the court's time.
They have the constant threat of **AA subpoenas over their heads. The last thing they want to do is have enough file sharers that some piece of shit lawyer on their team thinks they should sue the university for facilitating it.
Except if they don't monitor content at all, the laws protect them. It's called the DMCA Safe Harbor. If you're operating a network that simple passes content between two third parties, and don't monitor it at all, you're fine.
This only applies if they 'have no knowledge of, or financial benefit from, infringing activity on its network', though, so the second Valdosta sets up this monitor and asserts that P2P traffic is 'illegal', they're totally fucked and now can get sued.
The courts in 1909, the finder of fact, determined that the railroads gave Standard Oil a significant advantage by discriminating against all of Standard Oil's competitors.
If you want to argue that the railroad monopoly caused Standard Oil, you can, but that's not the only reason they existed. They were just so extremely abusive a monopoly they used the railroads to help them be abusive.
Your second question is silly because there was no monopoly. The Linseed Oil Trust was an example of market collusion by individual non-monopolies.
Um, only if you've decided to define 'monopoly' so that it can't be a trust.
Which it, in fact, can. The Linseed Oil Trust itself was a monopoly. It doesn't matter what non-monopolies it helped collude with each other, it was the monopoly.
Your third question answers itself. U.S. Steel was ruled a "monopoly" with (only) 67% market share, but was never broken up or regulated against because it wasnt doing anything wrong.
Which doesn't change the fact it could have.
I quote the post I was replying to: 'In every single instance I can think of, monopolies arise as the result of state interference in the market, either directly or indirectly, which only happens in command economies or "mixed" economies, not in free markets.'
There are two fucking monopolies I posted which inarguably appeared without regulation causing them: The Linseed Oil Trust and U.S. Steel.
The fact that the first was a trust doesn't change the fact it was a monopolizing trust, and the fact the later wasn't an illegal monopoly doesn't change the fact it was a monopoly, it was just a legal one.
Microsoft was also a monopoly that wasn't due to government regulation, but for some reason people think 'Oh, they had copyright, that's government regulation' excludes them, although that's stupid...copyright is no more 'government regulation' than normal property ownership.
Obviously, in the strict sense, government regulation creates all monopolies, because government regulation creates all corporations. And, of course, government regulation creates all ownership, period, without which a monopoly would be pretty tricky.
But somehow the people who are arguing that 'government regulations creates all monopolies' never want to do the next logical step of forbidding the government from creating corporations, or forbidding the government from issuing copyrights, or forbidding it from letting corporations own property.
I look how anti-regulation kooks try to paint the post office as inefficient. The US Post Office is one of the most efficient shipping organizations in the world.
Go ahead, look up how much it costs to mail a letter in England. 41 pence. Which is 66 cents, 50% more than the US, and that's only delivery to Great Britain (England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, channel isles, etc.), not to other places in the UK, whereas the US rate includes places like Hawaii and the US Virgin Islands and military bases.
They're so cheap that UPS and FedEX are now using them for some package delivery.
I swear to god, it's like people making jokes about 'airline food' or something. It's a joke with a total disconnect from actual facts.
And how exactly is the IRS inefficient? The tax code is inefficient, but the IRS isn't.
They have the network of users -- a "critical mass" of participants that will make it hard for competitors to break into the market.
Except social networking companies don't have it in the other direction, because they aren't charging money, and hence there's no barrier to users simply using multiple sites. A network effect is when customers have to choose one company, and pick the one that everyone else uses because that is helpful, like how people choose cell phone companies to get free calls.
But 'customers' aren't paying 'per site', they're paying in ad views and it's entirely transparent to the customer.
Network effect only helps where it costs customers 'more' to use two providers instead of one. Using two social networking sites is only minutely more 'expensive' than using one. The network effect is trivial...you can use the magical new social networking startup and Facebook at the same time and it only costs a bit more time.
Let's just hope somebody can wrapper Facebook soon.
Uh, you mean like Yoono? Puts myspace, facebook, linkedin, twitter, all in one interface.
And if you look at non-artificial monopolies of the past, you'll notice that all of them either failed due to bad decisions and general incompetence, or they were forced to split up by government.
Yes, and all marriages end in either divorce or death.
What exactly were you saying? 'Of all monopolies that have ceased to exist, all of them either died naturally or were killed by the government.'? Well, yeah...there's not actually another way for a corporation to cease to exist.
Is it a "perfectly competitive" market? It comes close here, too. Barriers to entry? Anyone can throw up a website. Transaction costs? Cost of bandwidth. Exit costs? Turn off your modem. Perfect factor mobility? It's why the Pirate Bay hasn't been shut down.
Yeah, the article is idiotic. For 'monopolies', I sure seem to use a lot of competitors.
I mean, I've bought exactly two things on Amazon, and one on eBay, my entire life. And yet I do buy stuff online...I just buy from BN.com for books, and directly from places for other stuff.
Those are just large online business. It's like calling Walmart a monopoly. Even the people who dislike Walmart, and claim they're harmful for a community, and I'm one of those (Although more from how they treat employees than their business practices) have to admit they aren't a monopoly. Their economics of scales might harm other businesses, but it's not due to 'monopoly', it's due to volume. And the same for Amazon and eBay.
Twitter doesn't appear to make any money from me at all, so I'm not really understanding how it's a 'monopoly', or even a functional business. That's like claiming 'air' is a monopoly. Seriously, someone explain how they're supposed to make money? Even the website, which no one uses anyway, has no ads. I've paid a third party more for an iPhone app to do twitter than the actual Twitter people have ever made off me.
And Skype isn't really an 'internet company'. It's a telecom. It's making money as a cheaper, less convenient version of Vonage. It also has a ton of free users, but, again, providing free services that no one makes money from is not really a 'monopoly'...it's just a loss leader for their for-sell services.
Google just appears to have really good PR and affiliate programs. As did Yahoo, as did Alta Vista. Bing's 'failure' is just MS having vaguely incompetent PR. (And being very careful to keep from using their monopoly in software so they don't get slapped by the courts, so they're more cautious about 'bundling' than Google has to be.)
The only thing with any barrier to entry, due to the network effect, is Facebook. And there's absolutely no reason that people wouldn't use multiple social networking sites, especially considering there are programs to manages multiple ones at once.
All corporations do everything with 'government protection', you nimrod, because they don't exist without the government. They don't just magically appear out of thin air.
You *DO* realize that 'small business', as used in that statistic, simply means a specific kind of corporation, and includes doctors and lawyers (Which people don't normally consider a 'business' at all.) and corporations that make millions of dollars a day?
Have you ever even LOOKED for a market breakdown on 99% of the goods and services you purchase? You *DO* realize that small business accounts for 99% of the business in the US, right?
Yeah, let's pretend those two statements have anything to do with each other. Just because they are 99% of the businesses doesn't mean they are 99% of the goods and services people purchase. In fact, according to the government, despite being 99.7% of all businesses, they only employ half the employed people in the US. It would seem unlikely that half the people working are producing 99% of the stuff.
Perhaps you should do the math. Start with your ISP, you're paying them every day. Are they a 'small business'? That food you're eating, was it made by a small business? Was it sold by one? The gas you bought, was it sold by a small business? Refined by one? Pumped by one?
If the answer to any of those question is 'no', small businesses are not supplying '99%' of your stuff.
The example that comes readily to mind of a monopoly at that time and place would be the railroads
This is because you know nothing about history at all, and know even less about economics. (Yes, you have negative knowledge about economics.)
Please explain how Standard Oil was created by legislation. You know, the reason we have anti-trust laws?
Or how the government made the National Linseed Oil Trust? No one cares about linseed oil, or even knows what it's for, but that monopoly managed to make it almost quadruple in price.
For that matter, please explain how US Steel, which the courts said was a monopoly but wasn't engaging in any abusive practices, was created by legislation. Just a few different business practices, which they could have trivially done, would have made them an illegal monopoly....they were just smart enough to carefully not do them. (So this is a clear example of regulation causing monopolistic abuses not to happen.)
I wish the courts would step in and give back first sell.
Hell, Steam has less a legal argument than anyone else...they can instantly make the old copy of your game stop working.
There's really no reason that you shouldn't be able to turn a 'Steam game you bought' into a key, disabling your copy, and making that game work when the key is entered on another (or the same) Steam account.
It doesn't matter to me, because I've never resold a video game in my life, but it should exist.
My take on it was that they had no right to fucking ask in the first place, as there is no law that says that they're allowed to demand ID for those in the first place.
They can demand you do anything legal that they want before selling the product to you, whether or not there's a 'law'.
More important, the voluntary card check that Best Buy does keeps the chance of some asshat actually attempting to make games like FO3 illegal because 'Won't someone think of the children?'.
And as a final thought: How many games actually need to have Steam if they're being sold as physical copies? Wouldn't it be preferable for the gamers if the game disc just installed single player mode without requiring the user has Steam, with the understanding that they can register their key/install Steam for multiplayer?
They can't do that, because they're using Steam's DRM instead of licensing DRM from another party. Yes, yes, we're all prefer no DRM, but that's not going to happen.
And DRM licensing isn't free. It would cost them money to have the game able to use 'Steam or Starforce', and it would be pretty tricky to do. (They'd probably have to swap executables.)
Incidentally, in the past, games have done what you said. For example, Neverwinter Nights originally had some sort of CD-based DRM, but when they came out with the DVD including the expansion packs, not only did they remove DRM from that, but the online patching removed the DRM from older games.
But to play online on various third party servers, you have to have separate product keys. IIRC, they used to be checked against some master server, but I think they patched that out, also, and now the only rule is 'can't use identical product keys on the same server'.
Of course, they relaxed all those rules when the game was years old.
He means, they're not actually using Steam 'in the game', or at least, that doesn't require it.
All that requires is using Steam in the installer, and using it instead of the copy protection. (Which is added later anyway. Copy protection isn't really 'in' the game, it's a wrapper around the game, added after the game is finished.)
Plenty of games sold on Steam don't use Steam 'in the game' at all, and nothing is stopped store-bought games that are copy-protected via Steam from doing the same minimal thing.
That is what the person meant by 'uses Steam'. The game was just wrapped with Steam instead of DRM, and sold using Steam instead of Walmart, neither of them are part of the game.
Except, of course, the game you mentioned actually does use Steam. It registers achievements and keeps saved games and probably does multiple player through it. It's not just 'wrapped' with Steam, like if you buy some random game that came out ten years ago that Steam is selling. (This is why it requires a Steam account.)
A distinction should be made between 'Steam games', which are actually written to require Steam, and 'games sold on Steam', which just have 'Steam copy protection' vs.. for example, 'Starforce copy protection'.
For people who don't have internet service, Valve could help stores set up a hub that contains the games.
Alternately, stores could set up time machines to bring those people to the present day.
Steam won't work without internet access.
It also won't work without a computer, BTW. Or electricity.
Either way, this will allow the brick and mortar stores to stay around for those who lack a good enough internet connection for Steam or downloadable games in general. They'd probably have to extend on the DRM system to work with this new method since they might never be online.
In much the same way that those ice sellers who went around delivering ice to iceboxes could store food for people who don't own a refrigerator, allowing the ice seller to stay in business. You're a genius!
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, the layman has no idea how science works at all.
Almost no one in this country can even give an brief summary of the scientific method. Almost no one knows how science works at all, in any manner. They can't give any explanation of what scientists actually do or how they do it.
Complaining about the Mythbuster's lack of rigor is like complaining about how teaching Maxwell's equations ignores quantum effects.
And I'll point out that science doesn't require rigor. Or, more specifically, it requires as much rigor as the field requires. As the Mythbusters are operating in their own field of 'urban legend', perhaps that field has exactly as much rigor as that field wants.
You want more rigor, you start doing scientific research in that field and start complaining about their lack of rigor, until then, shut up...you don't get to define how much rigor is needed for random field of science. Different fields have different accepted standards. Until some distinguished 'urban legend' institutions start criticizing their lack of rigor, and stops using their results, they have enough.
75% of American Jews think (correctly) that the goal of Arabs is the destruction of Israel.
Wow, EPIC READING COMPREHENSION FAIL.
That question was if this was true: 'The goal of the Arabs is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel.'
I.e, it's about Palestine, you nimrod.
Wrong. 75% of American Jews think (correctly) that the goal of Arabs is the destruction of Israel. Majority supports a US strike against Iran.
Yes, one day ahead of talks that were all over the news about Iran's nuclear program, 56% of American Jews managed to be for a strike. Wow, way to barely eek a majority there.
But did I say 'almost two years ago'? I do not believe I did.
Here's a more recent poll showing American Jews don't give a flying fuck about Iran.
Majority oppose calls on Israel to freeze settlement building.
And I said what about that?
That's just semantics. A head of state saying that another state should disappear from the pages of history is as threatening as it gets.
Really? As threatening as it gets?
More threatening then threatening to attack it? You know, like Israel's doing to Iran?
Perhaps you should check and see what 'semantics' means. He's not actually threatened Israel. Ever. At not point has he said 'Israel must do X, or we will attack it.'
Israel has. The US has. Get the goddamn plank out of your eye before condemning a country that, at the most evil, publicly wishes Israel to collapse.
He also finances a variety of anti-Israel militant groups,
No, he doesn't.
denies holocaust
Which makes him an asshole but doesn't make him magically at war with Israel.
and has said in numerous statements that any Arab country that accepts existence of Israel is a traitor to the Muslim world.
And, yes, again, another lie.
Many more anti-Israel statements: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel
Hey, you know that statement you just made up about 'any Arab country that accepts existence of Israel is a traitor to the Muslim world'? Yeah, it's not on that page.
Maybe you should read the fucking page you just linked to. It shows a lot of hatred towards Israel, and a lot of insults towards Zionism, and even a revisionist history. It shows a lot of claims that Israel is going to die, that the peace process is functionally dead.
What it doesn't have is any sort of threat towards Israel whatsoever, except a deliberate mistranslation.
In any case, all this is argument over unimportant details. Do you really doubt that if the day comes when Arab countries and Iran have the power to destroy Israel that they will hesitate for even one second?
Yes, I do think they'd 'hesitate', you goddamn imbecile, because most Middle East countries that invade other countries have done it with the expectation of our support. Iran hasn't fucking attacked anyone since India, before the British conquered it.
You're trying to paint them as goddamn belligerent punch-throwing crazy people, when they've done literally nothing to get such a reputation. Nothing. Ever. You've made up their entire reputation.
I said the other two are 'inarguable' because I simply didn't feel like arguing that Standard Oil wasn't caused by 'government interference'...but I guess I'll have to make that argument:
All monopolies are, strictly speaking, caused by 'government interference', because all corporations are caused by government interference. They don't exist otherwise. Which is what makes the 'no monopoly exists naturally, it's all caused by the government interfering in the free market' claim so stupid.
The Standard Oil monopoly existed because of perfectly normal land ownership laws. There was no 'government interference' for the railroads, they had no magical special rights to do stuff to their land.
Granted, they owned that land because the government eminent domained it, and sold it to them, but there is absolutely no reason that the railroads, or the oil companies for that matter, couldn't have bought enough land to stop competing shipments.
There might be a few people who refused to sell, but it's much easier to block something than to actually build something. You have to have an unbroken line to build, you can zig-zag to block. And considering that Standard Oil wouldn't need to build a pipeline anyway, they can bid more, and people are more likely to sell to them than their competitors. (Of course, in this hypothetical universe we have no functioning rail system, so I guess they would need to build something.)
All corporations have 'government interference' in their past, which is incredibly handy for libertarians when trying to explain why they're monopolies. Sadly for them, in almost all cases the monopoly could have happened just as easily without government interference, or the 'government interference' is something that everything relies on, like private property laws or railroads.
Guess what? If we didn't have private property laws, that evil 'government interference in the market', we wouldn't have monopolies either.
I actually entirely agree with you, but you shouldn't present it that way, as it will be taken as antisemitism, and isn't fair to ascribe to 'Jews'. Jews in the US are actually mostly on the left, and antiwar.
This mistaken belief that 'Jews' support Israel doing whatever it wants is due to the Israeli lobby in US, which like to claim that all Jews think the way it does. Which isn't true in the US or Israeli.
Most Jews, in both the US and Israel, are nowhere near as hostile to Muslim countries as the Israeli lobby tries to pretend is 'necessary for Israel's defense'. Most Jews in the US don't care about any of those warmongering issues at all, and Jews in Israel care about Palestine and maybe Lebanon. Not Iran. In fact, Israelis are much less likely to think Iran will attack Israel than Americans.
The neocon right in the US, the hardliners in Israel, and fanatic Muslim leaders, all have incentive to present Israel, supported by the US, at war with the Muslim world. They are all lying goddamn warmongers manipulating every out-of-context quote(1) and event(2) and wishing for an all-out war in the Middle East. Do not help them in any way. Don't assume 'Jews' actually want this.
1) No, the leader of Iran doesn't want to wipe Israel off the map, he wishes it would, in an analogy he made in every speech except the one time he didn't further explain it, disappear like the USSR. Yet warmongers here distorted that into a threat of nuclear annihilation.
2) And no, Qu'ran burning is not encouraged or even condoned by the US government, it was actually condemned. It's just, in the US, the government has no power to stop any display of religion. Yet warmongers in Yemen distorted that into an official government act.
More to the point, when did it become a state matter? It's a Federal issue! The Georgia police, state or local, can't do anything about copyright infringement. The FBI handles that.
It's entirely possible that the college meant they were informing the FBI, but they really sound like they think they should be turning in tips to the local police, who will very quickly inform them than they don't give a flying fuck about copyright infringement and 'if you keep bothering us with tips about things that are not actually crimes we'll have you arrested'.
Alright, some particularly stupid police officer who (say) didn't like students, might ignore all this *once* but it would soon turn into a media story + malicious prosecution suits + police wasting time etc., the EFF would probably get involved (with money etc.) and the college policy (the automatic report to police bit anyhow) would stop right there.
No, the police can't 'charge' people with crimes. They can arrest people on suspicion on crimes for up to 48 hours, (or, hell, arrest them without any stated reason.) but actually charging them is the job of the district attorney, who has to look at the evidence and sign off on an arrest warrant.
And DAs don't do stupid shit like that, because they are, tada, elected, and care about their win/loss ratio, and especially don't want exceptionally stupid cases filed that will make them look stupid at the next election.
And felonies, which I'm not sure this is, require more than that, the DA can't even go directly to trial, first he has to go to a grand jury and get them to agree that the case has enough evidence to have a trial.
Strictly speaking, anyone can go the grand jury and give them evidence and they can write an arrest warrant, for any crime, even misdemeanors. It is entirely possible to have someone convicted of a crime without the DA or police being involved at all, although it gets tricky trying to arrest them. And this has actually happened, google 'runaway grand juries', including a instance or two where the grand jury decided that the DA was in on it and charged them also. (That must be awkward for the police: 'Hey, here's that evidence in the Franklin case, I think we have enough to charge him. Can you sign off on it and we'll get it to the grand jury? Oh, and speaking of the grand jury...here's an arrest warrant from them, and, long story short, you're under arrest.')
Not that any of this is relevant, as copyright violation isn't illegal under Georgia law, and hence the Georgia police, either local or state, the DA, and/or the grand jury, would do fuck-all about reports someone was committing it, and if you kept wasting their time with those reports after being told it wasn't a state issue, you'd be charged with deliberately wasting the police or the court's time.
Perhaps more relevant to this discussion, copyright violation is not against Georgia law, so the police can't do anything anyway.
I don't understand what this is even supposed to do.
They have the constant threat of **AA subpoenas over their heads. The last thing they want to do is have enough file sharers that some piece of shit lawyer on their team thinks they should sue the university for facilitating it.
Except if they don't monitor content at all, the laws protect them. It's called the DMCA Safe Harbor. If you're operating a network that simple passes content between two third parties, and don't monitor it at all, you're fine.
This only applies if they 'have no knowledge of, or financial benefit from, infringing activity on its network', though, so the second Valdosta sets up this monitor and asserts that P2P traffic is 'illegal', they're totally fucked and now can get sued.
The courts in 1909, the finder of fact, determined that the railroads gave Standard Oil a significant advantage by discriminating against all of Standard Oil's competitors.
If you want to argue that the railroad monopoly caused Standard Oil, you can, but that's not the only reason they existed. They were just so extremely abusive a monopoly they used the railroads to help them be abusive.
Your second question is silly because there was no monopoly. The Linseed Oil Trust was an example of market collusion by individual non-monopolies.
Um, only if you've decided to define 'monopoly' so that it can't be a trust.
Which it, in fact, can. The Linseed Oil Trust itself was a monopoly. It doesn't matter what non-monopolies it helped collude with each other, it was the monopoly.
Your third question answers itself. U.S. Steel was ruled a "monopoly" with (only) 67% market share, but was never broken up or regulated against because it wasnt doing anything wrong.
Which doesn't change the fact it could have.
I quote the post I was replying to: 'In every single instance I can think of, monopolies arise as the result of state interference in the market, either directly or indirectly, which only happens in command economies or "mixed" economies, not in free markets.'
There are two fucking monopolies I posted which inarguably appeared without regulation causing them: The Linseed Oil Trust and U.S. Steel.
The fact that the first was a trust doesn't change the fact it was a monopolizing trust, and the fact the later wasn't an illegal monopoly doesn't change the fact it was a monopoly, it was just a legal one.
Microsoft was also a monopoly that wasn't due to government regulation, but for some reason people think 'Oh, they had copyright, that's government regulation' excludes them, although that's stupid...copyright is no more 'government regulation' than normal property ownership.
Obviously, in the strict sense, government regulation creates all monopolies, because government regulation creates all corporations. And, of course, government regulation creates all ownership, period, without which a monopoly would be pretty tricky.
But somehow the people who are arguing that 'government regulations creates all monopolies' never want to do the next logical step of forbidding the government from creating corporations, or forbidding the government from issuing copyrights, or forbidding it from letting corporations own property.
As I've been saying forever: Just saying things does not make them true.
Or, in the new lingo: Cite please.
I look how anti-regulation kooks try to paint the post office as inefficient. The US Post Office is one of the most efficient shipping organizations in the world.
Go ahead, look up how much it costs to mail a letter in England. 41 pence. Which is 66 cents, 50% more than the US, and that's only delivery to Great Britain (England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, channel isles, etc.), not to other places in the UK, whereas the US rate includes places like Hawaii and the US Virgin Islands and military bases.
They're so cheap that UPS and FedEX are now using them for some package delivery.
I swear to god, it's like people making jokes about 'airline food' or something. It's a joke with a total disconnect from actual facts.
And how exactly is the IRS inefficient? The tax code is inefficient, but the IRS isn't.
The only thing like a monopoly that I have ever heard of that did not result from government action is Microsoft.
Then your school failed you, because you've never heard of Standard Oil. You know, the reason we have antitrust laws?
They have the network of users -- a "critical mass" of participants that will make it hard for competitors to break into the market.
Except social networking companies don't have it in the other direction, because they aren't charging money, and hence there's no barrier to users simply using multiple sites. A network effect is when customers have to choose one company, and pick the one that everyone else uses because that is helpful, like how people choose cell phone companies to get free calls.
But 'customers' aren't paying 'per site', they're paying in ad views and it's entirely transparent to the customer.
Network effect only helps where it costs customers 'more' to use two providers instead of one. Using two social networking sites is only minutely more 'expensive' than using one. The network effect is trivial...you can use the magical new social networking startup and Facebook at the same time and it only costs a bit more time.
Let's just hope somebody can wrapper Facebook soon.
Uh, you mean like Yoono? Puts myspace, facebook, linkedin, twitter, all in one interface.
And if you look at non-artificial monopolies of the past, you'll notice that all of them either failed due to bad decisions and general incompetence, or they were forced to split up by government.
Yes, and all marriages end in either divorce or death.
What exactly were you saying? 'Of all monopolies that have ceased to exist, all of them either died naturally or were killed by the government.'? Well, yeah...there's not actually another way for a corporation to cease to exist.
Why would they need to be 'compatible' with each other?
You want to use multiple services at one, you simply use a program designed to do that, like Yoono.
Is it a "perfectly competitive" market? It comes close here, too. Barriers to entry? Anyone can throw up a website. Transaction costs? Cost of bandwidth. Exit costs? Turn off your modem. Perfect factor mobility? It's why the Pirate Bay hasn't been shut down.
Yeah, the article is idiotic. For 'monopolies', I sure seem to use a lot of competitors.
I mean, I've bought exactly two things on Amazon, and one on eBay, my entire life. And yet I do buy stuff online...I just buy from BN.com for books, and directly from places for other stuff.
Those are just large online business. It's like calling Walmart a monopoly. Even the people who dislike Walmart, and claim they're harmful for a community, and I'm one of those (Although more from how they treat employees than their business practices) have to admit they aren't a monopoly. Their economics of scales might harm other businesses, but it's not due to 'monopoly', it's due to volume. And the same for Amazon and eBay.
Twitter doesn't appear to make any money from me at all, so I'm not really understanding how it's a 'monopoly', or even a functional business. That's like claiming 'air' is a monopoly. Seriously, someone explain how they're supposed to make money? Even the website, which no one uses anyway, has no ads. I've paid a third party more for an iPhone app to do twitter than the actual Twitter people have ever made off me.
And Skype isn't really an 'internet company'. It's a telecom. It's making money as a cheaper, less convenient version of Vonage. It also has a ton of free users, but, again, providing free services that no one makes money from is not really a 'monopoly'...it's just a loss leader for their for-sell services.
Google just appears to have really good PR and affiliate programs. As did Yahoo, as did Alta Vista. Bing's 'failure' is just MS having vaguely incompetent PR. (And being very careful to keep from using their monopoly in software so they don't get slapped by the courts, so they're more cautious about 'bundling' than Google has to be.)
The only thing with any barrier to entry, due to the network effect, is Facebook. And there's absolutely no reason that people wouldn't use multiple social networking sites, especially considering there are programs to manages multiple ones at once.
All corporations do everything with 'government protection', you nimrod, because they don't exist without the government. They don't just magically appear out of thin air.
You *DO* realize that 'small business', as used in that statistic, simply means a specific kind of corporation, and includes doctors and lawyers (Which people don't normally consider a 'business' at all.) and corporations that make millions of dollars a day?
Have you ever even LOOKED for a market breakdown on 99% of the goods and services you purchase?
You *DO* realize that small business accounts for 99% of the business in the US, right?
Yeah, let's pretend those two statements have anything to do with each other. Just because they are 99% of the businesses doesn't mean they are 99% of the goods and services people purchase. In fact, according to the government, despite being 99.7% of all businesses, they only employ half the employed people in the US. It would seem unlikely that half the people working are producing 99% of the stuff.
Perhaps you should do the math. Start with your ISP, you're paying them every day. Are they a 'small business'? That food you're eating, was it made by a small business? Was it sold by one? The gas you bought, was it sold by a small business? Refined by one? Pumped by one?
If the answer to any of those question is 'no', small businesses are not supplying '99%' of your stuff.
The example that comes readily to mind of a monopoly at that time and place would be the railroads
This is because you know nothing about history at all, and know even less about economics. (Yes, you have negative knowledge about economics.)
Please explain how Standard Oil was created by legislation. You know, the reason we have anti-trust laws?
Or how the government made the National Linseed Oil Trust? No one cares about linseed oil, or even knows what it's for, but that monopoly managed to make it almost quadruple in price.
For that matter, please explain how US Steel, which the courts said was a monopoly but wasn't engaging in any abusive practices, was created by legislation. Just a few different business practices, which they could have trivially done, would have made them an illegal monopoly....they were just smart enough to carefully not do them. (So this is a clear example of regulation causing monopolistic abuses not to happen.)
I wish the courts would step in and give back first sell.
Hell, Steam has less a legal argument than anyone else...they can instantly make the old copy of your game stop working.
There's really no reason that you shouldn't be able to turn a 'Steam game you bought' into a key, disabling your copy, and making that game work when the key is entered on another (or the same) Steam account.
It doesn't matter to me, because I've never resold a video game in my life, but it should exist.
My take on it was that they had no right to fucking ask in the first place, as there is no law that says that they're allowed to demand ID for those in the first place.
They can demand you do anything legal that they want before selling the product to you, whether or not there's a 'law'.
More important, the voluntary card check that Best Buy does keeps the chance of some asshat actually attempting to make games like FO3 illegal because 'Won't someone think of the children?'.
And as a final thought: How many games actually need to have Steam if they're being sold as physical copies? Wouldn't it be preferable for the gamers if the game disc just installed single player mode without requiring the user has Steam, with the understanding that they can register their key/install Steam for multiplayer?
They can't do that, because they're using Steam's DRM instead of licensing DRM from another party. Yes, yes, we're all prefer no DRM, but that's not going to happen.
And DRM licensing isn't free. It would cost them money to have the game able to use 'Steam or Starforce', and it would be pretty tricky to do. (They'd probably have to swap executables.)
Incidentally, in the past, games have done what you said. For example, Neverwinter Nights originally had some sort of CD-based DRM, but when they came out with the DVD including the expansion packs, not only did they remove DRM from that, but the online patching removed the DRM from older games.
But to play online on various third party servers, you have to have separate product keys. IIRC, they used to be checked against some master server, but I think they patched that out, also, and now the only rule is 'can't use identical product keys on the same server'.
Of course, they relaxed all those rules when the game was years old.
He means, they're not actually using Steam 'in the game', or at least, that doesn't require it.
All that requires is using Steam in the installer, and using it instead of the copy protection. (Which is added later anyway. Copy protection isn't really 'in' the game, it's a wrapper around the game, added after the game is finished.)
Plenty of games sold on Steam don't use Steam 'in the game' at all, and nothing is stopped store-bought games that are copy-protected via Steam from doing the same minimal thing.
That is what the person meant by 'uses Steam'. The game was just wrapped with Steam instead of DRM, and sold using Steam instead of Walmart, neither of them are part of the game.
Except, of course, the game you mentioned actually does use Steam. It registers achievements and keeps saved games and probably does multiple player through it. It's not just 'wrapped' with Steam, like if you buy some random game that came out ten years ago that Steam is selling. (This is why it requires a Steam account.)
A distinction should be made between 'Steam games', which are actually written to require Steam, and 'games sold on Steam', which just have 'Steam copy protection' vs.. for example, 'Starforce copy protection'.
For people who don't have internet service, Valve could help stores set up a hub that contains the games.
Alternately, stores could set up time machines to bring those people to the present day.
Steam won't work without internet access.
It also won't work without a computer, BTW. Or electricity.
Either way, this will allow the brick and mortar stores to stay around for those who lack a good enough internet connection for Steam or downloadable games in general. They'd probably have to extend on the DRM system to work with this new method since they might never be online.
In much the same way that those ice sellers who went around delivering ice to iceboxes could store food for people who don't own a refrigerator, allowing the ice seller to stay in business. You're a genius!
A disk is like a flash drive, but it's much bigger and write-only, and you need a special port on your computer to use it.