demonstrated a new form of matter that melds the characteristics of lasers and superconductors Over the last ten years I've watched the news releases about physics--and it seems that physics is wh0ring itself out just for news headlines. The population doesn't get excited about higher order mathematics, spheroidal harmonics, oscilloscopes, or statistical s very well. A new form of matter, though, why that's something we should put on the front page!
Did they really demonstrate a new form of matter? What did we have at one time? Solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. We could have mixtures of the forms--like a suspension was a fine mixture of a liquid with a gas. I'm not seeing much in this article, though, which necessitates the material which they've created as being a new form of matter.
They've saturated a solid with a form of energy called "polaritons". Did anyone stop to think, oh, maybe fifteen years back, that maybe the conceptual m0del of a photon just needs a little brushing up? People thought that an atom was plum pudding at one time. We didn't end up with a million different atoms, atomitons, atomites, and gluoneoatomiquarks. Once the of the atom was refined well enough it has stayed, for the greatest part, the same atom.
I think the community should spend some time combining these polaritons, and fermions, and gluons, and quarks, and mesons, and bosons, all together with photons. It would probably make much of the math a lot simpler.
Granted, though, the headline news releases wouldn't be quite as dramatic. Physics isn't supposed to be caked with drama. That's what the rest of society is for. Let them keep it. Drama sucks.
A more sane way of solving the problem is to have the consumer pay the true cost of energy Don't we already?
Does the gasoline you buy...Put a tax on gas to foot the bill. What's happening to the tax money we're already paying?
Does gasoline hurt the environment? Put a tax on it to cover the cost What's happening to the tax money we're already paying?
I understand what you're saying but I think there's a hole in the government's pocket which, if sewn up, could allow many of these problems to work themselves out.
Wait, you invoked supply and demand to infer price. If supply goes up along with demand then the price should remain the same. I don't have total output numbers available.
Still, though, I'm not buying any idealized edition of the economy. Price has gone up for two reasons: 1) because it can do so rapaciously and today's cities are designed with the assumption that transportation is fast and easy, and 2) because those top level Wall Street managers who lost millions in the.com bust are shoring up their profits through investments in newly extra-profitable businesses associated with delivering gasoline to the public.
Why does everyone look for the most meaningless answer (eg. some idealized form of gradeschool economics) while turning a blind eye to the reality of the way the world works?
Is there any way to correlate teleworkers with productive companies? I'd be okay with telecommuting but not if I know that the company, along with twenty others, is just a front for a fund manager to pad the performance of his assets.
I guess if you're a telecommuter who's being paid fat and happy you're not much worried that the money funding your salary is, at the other end, sucking the retirement funds of a thousand blue collar line workers dry.
I avoided prepackaged computer systems throughout the 90s for precisely that reason. Knowing the state of software copyright laws at the time, if I wasn't going to receive a full backup copy of all the software necessary to restore the system from ground zero then I wasn't interested in the system. That said I did have to make a few long distance phone calls to USR to be given a dial-in BBS number to download updated drivers for one of their 56k modems. Generic drivers only worked to 2400.
I saw it as a travesty when the computer industry offloaded millions of systems between '94 and '00 with little or no factory backup disks. I was even less amused when companies began shipping restoration image disks which only worked if the (usually flawed) software on the disk determined that the system needed to be restored--and usually did so without any consideration paid to settings which had been customized by the user after the system was shipped.
Most Windows systems come preinstalled with various backdoors and trojans. All it takes is a little insider knowledge--social connections within the software groups at MS--to know about them, access them, and activate them.
The best part is that it's been going on for 15 years and everyone still acts surprised!
There are many unanswered questions about the universe and religion and us in general. And only God knows all of the answers. Every day he lets some of us in on a little bit more, some more than others, and everyone gets to know something just a little bit different.
But, at the end of the day, God is still the only one with all of the answers.
a unique elemental composition? Wow. You really don't know anything about the science behind this, do you?
Stars do not, for certain, have a unique elemental composition. They have a characteristic fingerprint of radiation which we interpret to correspond with various elemental compositions. The fact is that we've only recorded sets of photons and then drawn conclusions, some of them are well-founded but they are still interpreted conclusions nevertheless, about what elements those photons most likely were emitted from.
Recognizing that astronomical observers are recording radiation leads back to my initial explanation:
That the stars and galaxies look different is only because the pictures are taken at different angles...Imagine standing on the inside of an irregularly shaped egg with a perfectly reflective inner surface and looking around you That perfectly reflective inner surface is irregularly shaped--like crinkled up aluminum foil. Take a piece of crinkled aluminum foil, spread it somewhat flat, and then begin looking at it from different angles. The pattern of colors reflected back to you will be different every time you change the angle--yet it's still the same piece of aluminum foil.
Want to believe that God created the universe 10 seconds ago? No problem: God created you with memories of events that never occurred 'earlier' in your life, old newspapers with realistic-sounding events, light from the stars and the Sun were created partway in transit to the earth, etc etc. God can do that 'cuz He's all-powerful, don't ya know? Unless you're particularly attached to living in the past then what does it matter if God created the universe 100 billion years ago or 10 microseconds ago? It doesn't change what the present is and the future is still just as open-ended. Why get your underwear all knotted up over it?
I also don't think the Romans had birth certificates They may not have had birth certificates but it's quite likely that they had marriage records. Keeping track of lineages is something which most cultures have been very interested in doing. I can't find the particular reference now (I came across it while reading various condensed histories of the world on Wikipedia--trying to figure out just how old the Biblically recorded world is) but it was a great tragedy for the Hebrews when a large fire wiped out the library holding their lineage records sometime in the first century AD (It may have been Nero's fire but I think that was separate). The official reason for keeping those records was that it was necessary to know who could marry to whom, especially when the marriages of priests or priestesses was being considered. The real reason is that keeping track of lineages was a way of keeping track of debt--and a way of hiding that purpose.
Since everyone was supposed to be working together for the greater benefit of the entire society it wouldn't be such a good idea to be forthright and honest and flaunt the fact that the socioeconomic system is now, and has been for ten thousand years, rigged. It was (and still is) a tool of social control; a kind of obfuscated nepotism designed to perpetuate the socioeconomic stratification of society across generations, centuries, and millenia. It's the very reason why we have (in the world) nobility, gentry, serfs, slaves, an upper class, a middle class, and a lower class.
So, yes, after some fashion the Romans probably kept birth and/or marriage records. Historical scholars might even know in which library they're still kept.
That star was what we looked like 26.4 billion years ago. Not we as in you and I, but we as in an area--and not just volummetric, but similar in mass and energy as well--roughly the same size as the observed star. The pictures that we take with the Hubble, ESO's VLT, and other deep space scanning arrays only see the radiation which has been reflected. They don't see the radiation which has kept going. We're not observing radiation which is coming from that star--we're seeing radiation which came from here, went to there, and is now reflecting back off of some deep space mirror--maybe a reflective atmosphere of some distant planet.
If I want to take that to the extreme one could hypothesize that we really are at the center of the universe, the Big Bang did start right here, and the light (or energy) which we are calling "HE 1523" started out here 26.4 billion years ago and now we're recording (photographing) the light which has reflected back off of something on a distant side of the universe.
Taking that to a further extreme one could say that every picture--each and every single one--or recording made of radiation observed from outer space is a mere reflection of radiation which originated here. That the stars and galaxies look different is only because the pictures are taken at different angles.
Imagine standing on the inside of an irregularly shaped egg with a perfectly reflective inner surface and looking around you. Conceptually the universe is somewhat similar to the spacecraft that young Superman travelled in as portrayed in the first Superman movie--except the boundaries are constantly shifting and changing according to God's whim.
The only thing left is to tie it in with string theory and envision a matrix of these irregularly shaped eggs, each infinitely enormous, each with its own 27.4 billion year old big bang.
I get criticized by those above me if they don't "sound" sufficiently intelligent. They won't say it publicly, but privately they will readily admit that the more confusion you add to the paper by using big words and clumping them together in obtuse ways will make the paper seem more professional Middle managers have always played down my presentations, when evaluating them for the upper management, with some vague hand waving and the blanket statement "It's all very complicated."
Upper management, not wanting to delve into the complicated explanation, has been more than happy to take them at their word and view me dismissively because I presented the material in a simplified form.
Which, in no way, grants the artist the RIGHT to make a living as an artist That's not even the point here.
And says NOTHING about what the artist can do with their "rights" once they are vested That has to do with the concept and definition of a secured right.
Why are you having such a hard time with this? Because it's very difficult to understand people who insist on being wrong.
And BTW, people sell other rights as well. People sell their right to free speech all of the time In similarly unConstitutional contracts. I've already stated that there are many reasons for staging a Revolution against the current federal government.
like whenever you have a court settlement where the parties can't discuss what happened An unConstitutional judgement. The government derives power from the Constitution and the courts derive power from the government. The judges cannot dictate terms over rights using power which they never had.
they accepted money in exchange for their freedom of speech with respect to a particular topic. This is not about money, chickens, parcels of land, or tickets to baseball games. This is about secured rights.
It's mighty paternalistic of you No, it's not. Paternalism is a broad and sweeping oversight--much more akin to our current government. Nobody is telling them what to write or invent, nobody is telling them how to do it, nobody is even telling them what color pen to use or what size paper to use. A single case of looking out for a Constitutionally secured right is not paternalism. The hyperbole is yours.
to decide that an artist cannot profit They're free to make a profit, and the profit would be more profitable if the government would do it's duty and work to secure their rights to them rather than facilitating the removal of rights from them.
from the rights secured by the constitution This is about whether or not the law serves the purpose of the Constitution--and it clearly does not.
by selling those rights You cannot sell a Constitutionally secured right. People may pay you for that right a million times but you still have it, for two reasons: 1) People naturally have all rights while governments derive their limited rights from the Constitution and the consent of the governed, and 2) it's a Constitutionally secured right.
because it's in the artist's best interests. And it would be in their better interest if the law actually worked for the purpose of the Constitution--which is to secure their right to them and prevent profiteers from using the ages old scam of economic superiority to swindle those rights from them.
Maybe you should move to Montana What's this? This has no place in a Constitutional debate.
and join the Minutemen Mostly white supremacists who wouldn't know true Constitutional patriotism if it came roaring down a mountain.
so you can plan your next revolution It will happen on its own as soon as a few more people begin to remove the blinders placed by twelve years of intentionally misdirected government schooling.
Again, why do you think artists have the RIGHT to be artists? They have a Constitutionally guaranteed secured right to their own writings and inventions.
Where is that right in the consitution? "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
I understand that King George and the British Parliament had a hard time grasping this concept as well.
Where does it say that an artist is not free to transfer their exclusive rights to another? That is inherent to the definition of a Constitutionally guaranteed secured right. Can you transfer your right to free speech? Can you transfer your right to life? Can you transfer your right not to be a slave? Don't be ridiculous.
Once the exclusive rights are granted Even you should be able to see the difference between "granted to" and "secured to".
this clause says nothing about the future alienation of those rights by the owner. Even you should be able to see the difference between "secured to" and "facilitate the alienation from".
Do you honestly think that artists would be able to negotiate a BETTER deal than they can now if they withheld transfer of ownership of the rights? That's what licensing is all about, dumbass.
They are free to do so now, you know No, they are not, because of the combination of "facilitate the transfer from", "something is better than nothing", and the concept of a market monopoly, a trust, groupthink, and communism.
any artist could negotiate to maintain ownership of their rights if they wanted to Except for the despotic economic superiority of the record companies.
if that's BETTER for the artist, why don't they do that now. Because they are economically disadvantaged, dumbsh*t. You haven't progressed one inch since 1776, have you?
I'm just curious as to why you think that the record labels would be willing to pay MORE for LESS rights, under your scheme? For the same reason why artists are forced to accept exploitative contracts under the current scheme--because there is no other way to obtain what they need.
What price SHOULD an artist be paid for his or her work, other than the market price? That's not the point. The point is that the price is bargained for and the bargaining is affected by how much the rights are worth. If the rights are secured to the author or inventor then the author or inventor has a better bargaining position and will be able to negotiate a more favorable contract. If the government facilitates the removal of the inherent rights of the author or inventor then the bargaining position of the author or inventor is crippled and they are less likely to be able to negotiate a favorable contract.
That is why the Constitution says,"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
Now just what part of that is so astronomically difficult that you are completely unable to understand it?
The President insists that since he has wartime authorization Is anyone ever going to question the perpetual state of war that we're being kept in? Or is it just too darn profitable for the investment brokers pulling the strings on the politicians?
Dude, where are you coming from? La Jolla, CA
You seem to be a most extreme literalist Any other interpretation doesn't fit with the Declaration of Independence or the circumstances surrounding the Revolutionary War.
libertarian That's bad for PR. Republicans aren't really republicans, Democrats aren't really democrats, and, while many Libertarians really are libertarians, the Demopublicans have made a large effort to discredit them based on name alone. The methods which they employ are commonly referred to as gossip, shunning, defamation, scapegoating, harassment, brighting, shining, etc. and the deployment of those methods are detailed very carefully in most training manuals for CIA/FBI/NSA/military field training in politically unfriendly environments. There's probably plenty of it floating around Iraq and Afghanistan right now.
but then when you start talking about musicians, you DON'T want any market influences. Market influences are fine. You're making the same mistake that the Demopublicans have conditioned people to make--that Libertarians are all anarchists. The government has a place, it has a role, and that place, role, and duty are defined by the Constitution. Secure the rights to authors and inventors and then see what the market does about it. The market does not deserve to be able to dictate terms to the authors and inventors. Constitutionally the authors and inventors deserve to be able to dictate terms to the market. That's what a secured right does--it provides the position of dictating terms at the bargaining table.
You seem to think that someone who is "born to be a musician" has a RIGHT to able to support themselves as a musician If they make music then secure their rights to them and let the market figure out whether or not they can support themselves with those rights.
and anything else means that they starve or they are a slave. Which is the way most recording contracts treat them in today's market.
Well, I hate to break it to you You're not breaking anything to me.
but nobody has a RIGHT to be a musician But they do have a Constitutional right to the bargaining power afforded to them by their writings and inventions.
If you can't make enough money to survive as a musician Which we never find out when the government is facilitating the removal of their rights to their writings and inventions.
The market does not owe you a living wage. Neither do the authors and inventors owe them the rights to their writings and inventions--and no amount of copyright law can make them give up those rights because, Constitutionally, the rights are secured to the authors and inventors.
Oh, and BEST HYPERBOLE EVER. Not as extreme as the "every musician thinks they deserve to be a rock star" hyperbole which is used to support current copyright law. Under your line of reasoning every slave who wanted to be free wanted to be a billionaire plantation owner--or anyone who doesn't want to put up with an asshat for a manager wants to be homeless.
The Supreme Court has taken the position that pure literalism is not how we interpret the constitution.
The Declaration of Independence,"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
You state that the law hasn't been tested yet -- well, that's not entirely true. These laws get tested all of the time.
Again, from the Declaration of Independence,"He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries."
You can wish for a...weak central government and strong states -- hell, I agree with that -- but that's not the way it is today
It's impossible to argue with any true conscience that a weak central government was not precisely what the Constitutional authors had in mind; with very good reason.
And simply ignoring copyright laws
An unjust law is no law.
and pirating Usher CD's and copies of Spiderman 3
Honestly, in my life, I've pirated fewer than a dozen CDs, only about two hundred individual songs (using the strictest interpretation of "pirate"), and have legitimately purchased nearly one thousand CDs and a hundred DVDs. I don't advocate those methods but I do appreciate that, were the law written properly, the practice of sharing would not be equated with pirating.
isn't going to create a libertarian paradise
That's bad for PR.
where a literalist reading of the Consitution reigns in the legislative and executive branches' respective powers
It is impossible to argue, with any clear conscience, that this is not the way it was supposed to be, though--and for very good reason. The current executive and legislators, and their army of lawyers, have never had to fight a Revolutionary War against an oppressive regime and, because of their ignorance, they do not understand what the true American Patriots were really fighting for. The true American Patriots were fighting against the very system which our current executive and legislators work for. The current legal code, especially on the federal level, is as absolutely backwards, hypocritical, un-American and anti-Patriotic as it can be!
I'm not going to go point-by-point with you on this idea that copyright assignments are a cause for revolution.
Copyright is only the tip of the iceberg when I count reasons for revolution in this nation. What we truly need is a new Revolutionary War: not one against a foreign nation but one against our own government.
Not every law is bought and paid for by industry groups and corporations.
It certainly seems that way.
Contracts which are voidable due to duress are those where the signor had no other choice than to sign the contract
Your argument requires that everyone be willing to come to the brink of starvation before they are given any consideration above being a slave. I've already pointed out that this is in poor taste and lacking in moral character.
Just because you really, really, really want to be a rock star
That's a bipolar argument against fair compensation.
does NOT mean that you HAVE to sign a bad contract
In order to get anything more than nothing you have to sign a bad contract.
And just because you really, really, really want to be a rock star
Why do you continue with the bipolar extremist argument? Baiting is, again, in poor taste and la
I hope to god you pat yourself on the back I don't need it. in congratulations I have plenty. for how clever you I am not clever every time you strike someone I would never down with wordplay. I answered questions Don't let the fact that you actually say nothing I said what I needed to say in the first post in support of your own conclusions It's your problem if you can't handle being wrong distance you I'm not distanced from a feeling of success. Come up with a definition of success which doesn't rely solely on financial gain.
That said, I think your view of the constitution is overly narrow
When considering the circumstances surrounding the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the embodiment of everything that the Constitutional authors were trying to avoid, a narrow interpretation is the only one which can honestly be said to correspond with what they had in mind. Why would they create a framework to reinvent the same government with the same abuses which they were escaping from?
and certainly narrower than has been interpreted by the Supreme Court
In the Declaration of Independence,"He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries." which adequately describes what has happened to the Supreme Court and fully explains their flawed interpretation of the Constitution
One can disagree as to whether or not SCOTUS has got it right or not
Analysis of the methods by which rulers abuse their power, across the last ten thousand years, strongly indicates that they do not.
but for the time being at least, the sale or licensing of a copyright or patent is legal, and consitutional, in the U.S.
It's legal only in the sense that the law was written and has not yet been officially challenged successfully--but in no way is that law Constitutional.
Besides, your narrow view of the constitution doesn't mean that copyrights shouldn't be transferable
There's a world of difference between "secure to" and "facilitate the transfer from"
it only means that transfers should be controlled by state law
That's possible.
not federal law -- don't forget the 9th amendment:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Very true. In the ideal implementation of the Constitution the federal government would engage in only those laws which secure the rights to the authors and inventors while the states would be free to fine tune their respective implementations of transfer or licensing.
Of course this would invite the problem of an author or inventor moving between states with different interpretations since, as soon as they cross the state lines, whatever writings or inventions they had would default to being secured to them--as per federal Congressional empowerment.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people."
Very admirable use of the 9th and 10th Amendments which I see as ultimately important in capping the powers of the federal government in the interest of preventing the abuses of the British Parliament which the revolutionaries were seeking to avoid. The Constitution does delegate, specifically, to Congress the power to secure the rights.
The fact that the consitution in Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 8 doesn't say anything about selling or assigning or licensing copyrights and patents doesn't mean that Congress is prohibited from allowing it -- see the 9th amendment above.
Well, yes, it does. Congress is prevented from legislating on any matter in that arena unless it is to secure the rights to the authors and inventors. The rights of transferral or licensing, as you pointed out earlier, would be left to the respective state laws.
And even if you do read the constitution that way, it just means that then the states could go ahead and regulate the marketplace for copyrights.
Correct. The most important thing that a federal politician can learn to say is,"Unless you can show me the specific assignment in the Constitution then, I'm sorry, that's just not any of my business."
And, in fact, that's the way it was, at least with respect to sound recordings, up until the 1972 act,
I'm a little confused You certainly are.
are you saying the rotary engine doesn't have componentents whose change their direction of momentum, have bearings, or produce friction? No.
I'm starting to develop a picture in my mind of the Wankel fanatic You've been psychologically conditioned to see only what you're looking for.
strikingly similar to the electric universe fanatic Are you saying that the universe doesn't break down into particles with various electromagnetic charges?
Slashdot Mirror
Did they really demonstrate a new form of matter? What did we have at one time? Solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. We could have mixtures of the forms--like a suspension was a fine mixture of a liquid with a gas. I'm not seeing much in this article, though, which necessitates the material which they've created as being a new form of matter.
They've saturated a solid with a form of energy called "polaritons". Did anyone stop to think, oh, maybe fifteen years back, that maybe the conceptual m0del of a photon just needs a little brushing up? People thought that an atom was plum pudding at one time. We didn't end up with a million different atoms, atomitons, atomites, and gluoneoatomiquarks. Once the of the atom was refined well enough it has stayed, for the greatest part, the same atom.
I think the community should spend some time combining these polaritons, and fermions, and gluons, and quarks, and mesons, and bosons, all together with photons. It would probably make much of the math a lot simpler.
Granted, though, the headline news releases wouldn't be quite as dramatic. Physics isn't supposed to be caked with drama. That's what the rest of society is for. Let them keep it. Drama sucks.
I understand what you're saying but I think there's a hole in the government's pocket which, if sewn up, could allow many of these problems to work themselves out.
Wait, you invoked supply and demand to infer price. If supply goes up along with demand then the price should remain the same. I don't have total output numbers available.
.com bust are shoring up their profits through investments in newly extra-profitable businesses associated with delivering gasoline to the public.
Still, though, I'm not buying any idealized edition of the economy. Price has gone up for two reasons: 1) because it can do so rapaciously and today's cities are designed with the assumption that transportation is fast and easy, and 2) because those top level Wall Street managers who lost millions in the
Why does everyone look for the most meaningless answer (eg. some idealized form of gradeschool economics) while turning a blind eye to the reality of the way the world works?
Is there any way to correlate teleworkers with productive companies? I'd be okay with telecommuting but not if I know that the company, along with twenty others, is just a front for a fund manager to pad the performance of his assets.
I guess if you're a telecommuter who's being paid fat and happy you're not much worried that the money funding your salary is, at the other end, sucking the retirement funds of a thousand blue collar line workers dry.
I avoided prepackaged computer systems throughout the 90s for precisely that reason. Knowing the state of software copyright laws at the time, if I wasn't going to receive a full backup copy of all the software necessary to restore the system from ground zero then I wasn't interested in the system. That said I did have to make a few long distance phone calls to USR to be given a dial-in BBS number to download updated drivers for one of their 56k modems. Generic drivers only worked to 2400.
I saw it as a travesty when the computer industry offloaded millions of systems between '94 and '00 with little or no factory backup disks. I was even less amused when companies began shipping restoration image disks which only worked if the (usually flawed) software on the disk determined that the system needed to be restored--and usually did so without any consideration paid to settings which had been customized by the user after the system was shipped.
Most Windows systems come preinstalled with various backdoors and trojans. All it takes is a little insider knowledge--social connections within the software groups at MS--to know about them, access them, and activate them.
The best part is that it's been going on for 15 years and everyone still acts surprised!
If God felt like being a prankster for a day, for a year, or for a lifetime--what human being has the power to say "No" to God?
While we are counseled to love God it is also wise to fear a God who has the power to be a prankster without anyone who can question Him.
But, at the end of the day, God is still the only one with all of the answers.
Stars do not, for certain, have a unique elemental composition. They have a characteristic fingerprint of radiation which we interpret to correspond with various elemental compositions. The fact is that we've only recorded sets of photons and then drawn conclusions, some of them are well-founded but they are still interpreted conclusions nevertheless, about what elements those photons most likely were emitted from.
Recognizing that astronomical observers are recording radiation leads back to my initial explanation: That the stars and galaxies look different is only because the pictures are taken at different angles...Imagine standing on the inside of an irregularly shaped egg with a perfectly reflective inner surface and looking around you That perfectly reflective inner surface is irregularly shaped--like crinkled up aluminum foil. Take a piece of crinkled aluminum foil, spread it somewhat flat, and then begin looking at it from different angles. The pattern of colors reflected back to you will be different every time you change the angle--yet it's still the same piece of aluminum foil.
Since everyone was supposed to be working together for the greater benefit of the entire society it wouldn't be such a good idea to be forthright and honest and flaunt the fact that the socioeconomic system is now, and has been for ten thousand years, rigged. It was (and still is) a tool of social control; a kind of obfuscated nepotism designed to perpetuate the socioeconomic stratification of society across generations, centuries, and millenia. It's the very reason why we have (in the world) nobility, gentry, serfs, slaves, an upper class, a middle class, and a lower class.
So, yes, after some fashion the Romans probably kept birth and/or marriage records. Historical scholars might even know in which library they're still kept.
That star was what we looked like 26.4 billion years ago. Not we as in you and I, but we as in an area--and not just volummetric, but similar in mass and energy as well--roughly the same size as the observed star. The pictures that we take with the Hubble, ESO's VLT, and other deep space scanning arrays only see the radiation which has been reflected. They don't see the radiation which has kept going. We're not observing radiation which is coming from that star--we're seeing radiation which came from here, went to there, and is now reflecting back off of some deep space mirror--maybe a reflective atmosphere of some distant planet.
If I want to take that to the extreme one could hypothesize that we really are at the center of the universe, the Big Bang did start right here, and the light (or energy) which we are calling "HE 1523" started out here 26.4 billion years ago and now we're recording (photographing) the light which has reflected back off of something on a distant side of the universe.
Taking that to a further extreme one could say that every picture--each and every single one--or recording made of radiation observed from outer space is a mere reflection of radiation which originated here. That the stars and galaxies look different is only because the pictures are taken at different angles.
Imagine standing on the inside of an irregularly shaped egg with a perfectly reflective inner surface and looking around you. Conceptually the universe is somewhat similar to the spacecraft that young Superman travelled in as portrayed in the first Superman movie--except the boundaries are constantly shifting and changing according to God's whim.
The only thing left is to tie it in with string theory and envision a matrix of these irregularly shaped eggs, each infinitely enormous, each with its own 27.4 billion year old big bang.
Upper management, not wanting to delve into the complicated explanation, has been more than happy to take them at their word and view me dismissively because I presented the material in a simplified form.
I know exactly what you're talking about.
I for one welcome our greedy teenage northern European Baltic overlords!
They make awesome glaag.
I understand that King George and the British Parliament had a hard time grasping this concept as well.
That is why the Constitution says,"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"
Now just what part of that is so astronomically difficult that you are completely unable to understand it?
The Supreme Court has taken the position that pure literalism is not how we interpret the constitution.
The Declaration of Independence,"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
You state that the law hasn't been tested yet -- well, that's not entirely true. These laws get tested all of the time.
Again, from the Declaration of Independence,"He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries."
You can wish for a...weak central government and strong states -- hell, I agree with that -- but that's not the way it is today
It's impossible to argue with any true conscience that a weak central government was not precisely what the Constitutional authors had in mind; with very good reason.
And simply ignoring copyright laws
An unjust law is no law.
and pirating Usher CD's and copies of Spiderman 3
Honestly, in my life, I've pirated fewer than a dozen CDs, only about two hundred individual songs (using the strictest interpretation of "pirate"), and have legitimately purchased nearly one thousand CDs and a hundred DVDs. I don't advocate those methods but I do appreciate that, were the law written properly, the practice of sharing would not be equated with pirating.
isn't going to create a libertarian paradise
That's bad for PR.
where a literalist reading of the Consitution reigns in the legislative and executive branches' respective powers
It is impossible to argue, with any clear conscience, that this is not the way it was supposed to be, though--and for very good reason. The current executive and legislators, and their army of lawyers, have never had to fight a Revolutionary War against an oppressive regime and, because of their ignorance, they do not understand what the true American Patriots were really fighting for. The true American Patriots were fighting against the very system which our current executive and legislators work for. The current legal code, especially on the federal level, is as absolutely backwards, hypocritical, un-American and anti-Patriotic as it can be!
I'm not going to go point-by-point with you on this idea that copyright assignments are a cause for revolution.
Copyright is only the tip of the iceberg when I count reasons for revolution in this nation. What we truly need is a new Revolutionary War: not one against a foreign nation but one against our own government.
Not every law is bought and paid for by industry groups and corporations.
It certainly seems that way.
Contracts which are voidable due to duress are those where the signor had no other choice than to sign the contract
Your argument requires that everyone be willing to come to the brink of starvation before they are given any consideration above being a slave. I've already pointed out that this is in poor taste and lacking in moral character.
Just because you really, really, really want to be a rock star
That's a bipolar argument against fair compensation.
does NOT mean that you HAVE to sign a bad contract
In order to get anything more than nothing you have to sign a bad contract.
And just because you really, really, really want to be a rock star
Why do you continue with the bipolar extremist argument? Baiting is, again, in poor taste and la
I hope to god you pat yourself on the back I don't need it. in congratulations I have plenty. for how clever you I am not clever every time you strike someone I would never down with wordplay. I answered questions Don't let the fact that you actually say nothing I said what I needed to say in the first post in support of your own conclusions It's your problem if you can't handle being wrong distance you I'm not distanced from a feeling of success. Come up with a definition of success which doesn't rely solely on financial gain.
That said, I think your view of the constitution is overly narrow
When considering the circumstances surrounding the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the embodiment of everything that the Constitutional authors were trying to avoid, a narrow interpretation is the only one which can honestly be said to correspond with what they had in mind. Why would they create a framework to reinvent the same government with the same abuses which they were escaping from?
and certainly narrower than has been interpreted by the Supreme Court
In the Declaration of Independence,"He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries." which adequately describes what has happened to the Supreme Court and fully explains their flawed interpretation of the Constitution
One can disagree as to whether or not SCOTUS has got it right or not
Analysis of the methods by which rulers abuse their power, across the last ten thousand years, strongly indicates that they do not.
but for the time being at least, the sale or licensing of a copyright or patent is legal, and consitutional, in the U.S.
It's legal only in the sense that the law was written and has not yet been officially challenged successfully--but in no way is that law Constitutional.
Besides, your narrow view of the constitution doesn't mean that copyrights shouldn't be transferable
There's a world of difference between "secure to" and "facilitate the transfer from"
it only means that transfers should be controlled by state law
That's possible.
not federal law -- don't forget the 9th amendment:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Very true. In the ideal implementation of the Constitution the federal government would engage in only those laws which secure the rights to the authors and inventors while the states would be free to fine tune their respective implementations of transfer or licensing.
Of course this would invite the problem of an author or inventor moving between states with different interpretations since, as soon as they cross the state lines, whatever writings or inventions they had would default to being secured to them--as per federal Congressional empowerment.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people."
Very admirable use of the 9th and 10th Amendments which I see as ultimately important in capping the powers of the federal government in the interest of preventing the abuses of the British Parliament which the revolutionaries were seeking to avoid. The Constitution does delegate, specifically, to Congress the power to secure the rights.
The fact that the consitution in Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 8 doesn't say anything about selling or assigning or licensing copyrights and patents doesn't mean that Congress is prohibited from allowing it -- see the 9th amendment above.
Well, yes, it does. Congress is prevented from legislating on any matter in that arena unless it is to secure the rights to the authors and inventors. The rights of transferral or licensing, as you pointed out earlier, would be left to the respective state laws.
And even if you do read the constitution that way, it just means that then the states could go ahead and regulate the marketplace for copyrights.
Correct. The most important thing that a federal politician can learn to say is,"Unless you can show me the specific assignment in the Constitution then, I'm sorry, that's just not any of my business."
And, in fact, that's the way it was, at least with respect to sound recordings, up until the 1972 act,