Except of course that the Democratic Party successfully politicized that "bipartisan" commission. Mounting a strategic plan to influence everything from the composition of the committee to sending witnesses to testify before it who carefully hid their ties to the Democratic Party so as to appear to be just ordinary members of the community. For example, few if any Democratic Party incumbents in California lost their seats.
ESPN already does this. You can only view the ESPN360 website if your ISP pays ESPN a fee for every one of its subscribers. It is a small fee and most ISPs have concluded that passing that fee along to all of their subscribers is worth it to keep those who would jump to another provider in order to get access to the ESPN360 website. ESPN claims that ESPN360 is a free website, since they get to hide the charge in your Internet bill (the ISP is not going to break it out because then the people who have no interest in ESPN would scream, but since it is so small most of them are completely unaware of it).
Getting more people to vote is good for the democratic process so the DNC should not look at it as a benefit to the Republicans but instead it is a benefit to all Americans. It should be open sourced so America benefits.
Actually that is not true. Getting more people who care enough to know who they are voting for to vote is good for the democratic process. Getting people who vote based on what they learn about candidates in the last 30 days(or less) before the election is not good for the democratic process. The latter results in people voting for incumbents whose record while they were in office is exactly contrary to what many of those voters think they are voting for.
OK, I have many problems with Ron Paul, but he is by no stretch of the imagination a fascist. Please explain to me in what ways Ron Paul favors the government telling businesses how they should operate (that is what fascism is)? I have never seen anything in which Ron Paul has expressed support for any type of central planning of the economy.
The only 'fair' thing is to remove politics from the district drawing process altogether. Not easy or simple, but Money and Political District Drawing are 2 things that quite literally are a direct threat to our governmental system.
Not only is it not easy or simple, it is not possible. No matter how you set the process up, someone will manipulate it for political advantage. The one change that could be made (but if it is, it should be made at the state level, not the federal) is to make it so that districts are required to be contiguous and as geographically compact as possible. The problem with getting that enacted is that would preclude creating districts intended to maximize the number of districts which have a majority of particular minority ethnic groups.
What you fail to realize is that the big labels and the RIAA do not care about the stats. They believe that if they can control what you hear and when you hear it, they can determine what you will like. If they can do that, they believe that they can lower their costs and increase their profits. The fact that the evidence suggests that they are wrong does not stop them from trying. They suffer from the fallacy of central planners everywhere. They believe that by gathering the correct information and controlling the flow of information they can more efficiently control what people spend their money on than people will do on their own.
This fallacy continues despite repeated failures of every effort to put it into practice because it allows people to believe that they can be in control of the world around them.
Actually that is not entirely true. One element in determining whether or not someone can use the "fair use" defense against a charge of copyright infringement is whether or not they profited from the use. If you made an unauthorized copy of copyrighted material and profited from it, the burden of proof (not quite the correct term, but I cannot think of a better way to phrase it at the moment) to claim fair use is far higher than if you did not profit from it.
I am pretty sure that you cannot legally buy horse meat in the U.S. for human consumption. A few years back, Congress passed a law making it illegal for meat packing plants in the U.S. to export horse meat for human consumption. I believe the law was repealed because it caused a massive increase in abandoned and unwanted horses to the point where animal rescue groups which dealt with horses were overwhelmed and could not provide shelter and food for all of the horses that they were being asked to rescue.
You are the fool. All forms of government central planning of the economy are inevitably totalitarian. Socialism and Fascism are both economic systems that propose that the best way to manage the economy is for someone from a central authority to decide what goods and services people need and want and how much they should pay for those goods and services. Sooner or later, all forms of economic central planning will degenerate into totalitarianism, unless they collapse first.
Yes, how do you think the companies got the monopoly in the first place? That's right, the government gave it to them. Although the correct term is fascism. However it is an easy mistake to make since there is so little difference between socialism and fascism anyway.
You are correct that there is already too much discretion in who gets prosecuted. Of course this is not the first article on slashdot to suggest that certain people should not be prosecuted for crimes because their cause was noble.
Exactly, we have gotten to the point where people want exceptions made to the law, not in the law itself, but in the enforcement of the law. This is the path to either tyranny or anarchy (more likely the former), because it means that those in charge of deciding who to prosecute get to decide what is and is not a crime. Either the law is a good law and should be enforced against all who break it, or it is a bad law and should be changed.
W T H I thought the whole point of this thing was to go through quicker AND not have to be man-handled!?
Then you misunderstood. The whole point of these things was to test how well conditioned people were to act like rats in a maze and to reinforce said conditioning.
The difference between guns and knives is that a person who is taller and stronger has an advantage over someone smaller and weaker if they both have a gun. On the other hand, if they both have a gun, they are much closer to equal. Guns neutralize most physical discrepancies between two people. A five foot tall woman weighing 90 pounds carrying a knife is probably going to be overpowered by a six foot six inch man weighing 350 pounds if all she has is a knife to defend herself. On the other hand if she has a gun and knows how to use it, things are a lot more equal.
Banning assault weapons might not be 100% effective,...
See, here is the first part of the problem. You want to ban "assault weapons" and then you go on to talk as if you have said something that has meaning. Please define the term. What is an "assault weapon"?
I know what an "assault rifle" is. All of the definitions I have seen for "assault weapon" involve cosmetics.
Well, Chicago had just over 500 murders last year (most with firearms). Yet Chicago has some of the toughest (I am unaware of any location with tougher) restrictions on gun ownership. It does not look to me like the difference is gun control laws.
Of course, New Zealand, which does not have such strict gun controls, has not had a horrible mass shooting since then either. From 1980-1996 Australia's mass murder rate was 0.0042 incidents per 100,000 people, New Zealand's was 0.0050 incidents per 100,000 people. Since 1996 neither country has had a mass murder incident. How did the Australian gun ban influence the New Zealand mass murder rate?
Bi, you are making the mistake of confusing "assault weapons" with "assault rifles" (a mistake which those who use the term "assault weapons" intend). I do not know what the definition of "assault weapon" is in this new law, since the article does not tell us. However, the definition in the expired federal "assault weapon" ban was purely cosmetic. That is, the federal "assault weapon" ban banned weapons based on criteria that made no functional difference.
I suppose you will want to ban hammers next? After all the current gun control controversy is about rifles and more hammers were used to kill people in 2011 than rifles were used to kill people.
Actually, no we don't. The only people who need to be able to tell the difference are good guys with guns. Most good guys with guns know enough not to shoot anybody until they know which is which (which very rapidly becomes apparent once one of the first two goes down).
1) Why do new refineries need to be built when companies are meeting capacity by upgrading and retrofitting old ones?
You have apparently never heard of the concept of "single point of failure". The fewer refineries there are, the greater the amount of disruption that occurs in the market (and the greater the increase in price) when one of them experiences a problem in production.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Businesses told Mussolini how to operate the government? Hitler?
Except of course that the Democratic Party successfully politicized that "bipartisan" commission. Mounting a strategic plan to influence everything from the composition of the committee to sending witnesses to testify before it who carefully hid their ties to the Democratic Party so as to appear to be just ordinary members of the community. For example, few if any Democratic Party incumbents in California lost their seats.
ESPN already does this. You can only view the ESPN360 website if your ISP pays ESPN a fee for every one of its subscribers. It is a small fee and most ISPs have concluded that passing that fee along to all of their subscribers is worth it to keep those who would jump to another provider in order to get access to the ESPN360 website. ESPN claims that ESPN360 is a free website, since they get to hide the charge in your Internet bill (the ISP is not going to break it out because then the people who have no interest in ESPN would scream, but since it is so small most of them are completely unaware of it).
Getting more people to vote is good for the democratic process so the DNC should not look at it as a benefit to the Republicans but instead it is a benefit to all Americans. It should be open sourced so America benefits.
Actually that is not true. Getting more people who care enough to know who they are voting for to vote is good for the democratic process. Getting people who vote based on what they learn about candidates in the last 30 days(or less) before the election is not good for the democratic process. The latter results in people voting for incumbents whose record while they were in office is exactly contrary to what many of those voters think they are voting for.
OK, I have many problems with Ron Paul, but he is by no stretch of the imagination a fascist. Please explain to me in what ways Ron Paul favors the government telling businesses how they should operate (that is what fascism is)? I have never seen anything in which Ron Paul has expressed support for any type of central planning of the economy.
The only 'fair' thing is to remove politics from the district drawing process altogether. Not easy or simple, but Money and Political District Drawing are 2 things that quite literally are a direct threat to our governmental system.
Not only is it not easy or simple, it is not possible. No matter how you set the process up, someone will manipulate it for political advantage. The one change that could be made (but if it is, it should be made at the state level, not the federal) is to make it so that districts are required to be contiguous and as geographically compact as possible. The problem with getting that enacted is that would preclude creating districts intended to maximize the number of districts which have a majority of particular minority ethnic groups.
What you fail to realize is that the big labels and the RIAA do not care about the stats. They believe that if they can control what you hear and when you hear it, they can determine what you will like. If they can do that, they believe that they can lower their costs and increase their profits. The fact that the evidence suggests that they are wrong does not stop them from trying. They suffer from the fallacy of central planners everywhere. They believe that by gathering the correct information and controlling the flow of information they can more efficiently control what people spend their money on than people will do on their own.
This fallacy continues despite repeated failures of every effort to put it into practice because it allows people to believe that they can be in control of the world around them.
Actually that is not entirely true. One element in determining whether or not someone can use the "fair use" defense against a charge of copyright infringement is whether or not they profited from the use. If you made an unauthorized copy of copyrighted material and profited from it, the burden of proof (not quite the correct term, but I cannot think of a better way to phrase it at the moment) to claim fair use is far higher than if you did not profit from it.
I am pretty sure that you cannot legally buy horse meat in the U.S. for human consumption. A few years back, Congress passed a law making it illegal for meat packing plants in the U.S. to export horse meat for human consumption. I believe the law was repealed because it caused a massive increase in abandoned and unwanted horses to the point where animal rescue groups which dealt with horses were overwhelmed and could not provide shelter and food for all of the horses that they were being asked to rescue.
You are the fool. All forms of government central planning of the economy are inevitably totalitarian. Socialism and Fascism are both economic systems that propose that the best way to manage the economy is for someone from a central authority to decide what goods and services people need and want and how much they should pay for those goods and services. Sooner or later, all forms of economic central planning will degenerate into totalitarianism, unless they collapse first.
The difference between modern day Sweden and Nazi Germany is not their economic system. The difference is their political system.
Yes, how do you think the companies got the monopoly in the first place? That's right, the government gave it to them. Although the correct term is fascism. However it is an easy mistake to make since there is so little difference between socialism and fascism anyway.
You are correct that there is already too much discretion in who gets prosecuted. Of course this is not the first article on slashdot to suggest that certain people should not be prosecuted for crimes because their cause was noble.
Exactly, we have gotten to the point where people want exceptions made to the law, not in the law itself, but in the enforcement of the law. This is the path to either tyranny or anarchy (more likely the former), because it means that those in charge of deciding who to prosecute get to decide what is and is not a crime. Either the law is a good law and should be enforced against all who break it, or it is a bad law and should be changed.
W T H I thought the whole point of this thing was to go through quicker AND not have to be man-handled!?
Then you misunderstood. The whole point of these things was to test how well conditioned people were to act like rats in a maze and to reinforce said conditioning.
How long do you want to wait to see if it works? Chicago has had these tough laws for quite some time now (going back to the 1980s).
The difference between guns and knives is that a person who is taller and stronger has an advantage over someone smaller and weaker if they both have a gun. On the other hand, if they both have a gun, they are much closer to equal. Guns neutralize most physical discrepancies between two people. A five foot tall woman weighing 90 pounds carrying a knife is probably going to be overpowered by a six foot six inch man weighing 350 pounds if all she has is a knife to defend herself. On the other hand if she has a gun and knows how to use it, things are a lot more equal.
Banning assault weapons might not be 100% effective,... See, here is the first part of the problem. You want to ban "assault weapons" and then you go on to talk as if you have said something that has meaning. Please define the term. What is an "assault weapon"?
I know what an "assault rifle" is. All of the definitions I have seen for "assault weapon" involve cosmetics.
Well, Chicago had just over 500 murders last year (most with firearms). Yet Chicago has some of the toughest (I am unaware of any location with tougher) restrictions on gun ownership. It does not look to me like the difference is gun control laws.
Of course, New Zealand, which does not have such strict gun controls, has not had a horrible mass shooting since then either. From 1980-1996 Australia's mass murder rate was 0.0042 incidents per 100,000 people, New Zealand's was 0.0050 incidents per 100,000 people. Since 1996 neither country has had a mass murder incident. How did the Australian gun ban influence the New Zealand mass murder rate?
Bi, you are making the mistake of confusing "assault weapons" with "assault rifles" (a mistake which those who use the term "assault weapons" intend). I do not know what the definition of "assault weapon" is in this new law, since the article does not tell us. However, the definition in the expired federal "assault weapon" ban was purely cosmetic. That is, the federal "assault weapon" ban banned weapons based on criteria that made no functional difference.
I suppose you will want to ban hammers next? After all the current gun control controversy is about rifles and more hammers were used to kill people in 2011 than rifles were used to kill people.
Actually, no we don't. The only people who need to be able to tell the difference are good guys with guns. Most good guys with guns know enough not to shoot anybody until they know which is which (which very rapidly becomes apparent once one of the first two goes down).
When are you going to go after the hammer nuts? After all, more people were killed in 2011 with hammers than were killed with rifles.
1) Why do new refineries need to be built when companies are meeting capacity by upgrading and retrofitting old ones?
You have apparently never heard of the concept of "single point of failure". The fewer refineries there are, the greater the amount of disruption that occurs in the market (and the greater the increase in price) when one of them experiences a problem in production.