If voting does not change anything, why do the elderly have outsized influence on America's political system? The best explanation I have seen for that is because they vote.
No, it is like saying she deserved to get raped because she dressed like a hooker, spent time standing on a street corner with a bunch of hookers and got in a car with a strange guy who asked if she wanted to party.
You are correct that it would cost jobs, but offshoring would not get around it. It would be trivial for Congress to pass a law collecting from businesses that sell to consumers from outside of the country and equally trivial to enforce it against any large enough to be a shell for a company that is actually located in the U.S.. The problem is that this law would make it harder for a small business to get started. Existing regulations have made it difficult to start a brick and mortar retail business as a small, fully legal side business, this would extend that difficulty to being an online retailer.
And a boatload of work for small startup companies. You seem to be unaware that many states do not have a single sales tax rate. Instead some states have a rate that varies according to what municipality you are in at the time of the sale. This is not something that can be determined by zip code as zip codes are not divided by local municipality boundaries but are instead determined by what post office the USPS delivers mail to that address from.
So, in place of the many thousands of startups that will not get started because one more regulatory and financial hurdle has been put in their path, you are proposing that we settle for a single startup and call it a win?
OK, so what you are saying is that people should give up on fixing copyright because people have been talking about doing so for over 100 years and the problem has only gotten worse. Further you are of the opinion that people who propose fixing copyright must be ignorant of the history of attempts to implement the solution they propose because otherwise they would know that fixing copyright was hopeless and give up (ignoring the possibility that people are aware of the history but still hope that maybe they can convince enough people to change things sometime in the future).
To reiterate, you appear to hold the position that our legal system is hopelessly corrupt and we should just give up trying to fix it because most people are completely unaware of the problem and can't be bothered to help fix it.
OK, you claim that because people have been saying that copyright should be limited in duration for a long time and yet legislators keep extending it ever longer, the people who say that it should be limited have no credibility. I do not follow your logic. I guess what you are saying is that we should just accept copyright law as it is, since people have opposed it for a long time.
That is exactly what I was thinking. I am confused as to why the people who are most vocally calling for the ITU to take active control over governance of the Internet are representatives of the governments with the strongest history of actively suppressing freedoms if the only reason for this discussion is to ensure that the Internet remain open.
What are you talking about? People have hated florescent bulbs for as long as I can remember. The reasons varied, but for the most part people hated them.
Perhaps if politicians hadn't made promises they should have known the public wouldn't support in the name of self-same public while pocketing campaign contributions from those who benefited the most from those promise, the public would not be desiring to repudiate those promises now that they are finding out exactly what the politicians promised.
This is certainly true of Polaroid, but Kodak, for all intents and purposes, invented digital photography and still failed to capitalize on the technology that made their primary product obsolete.
The US gubmint isn't going to remove him, because he doesn't have any oil,...
Well, that and the fact that the Chinese government is backing him up with nukes, but sure the key factor is the fact that he doesn't have any oil. I'm sure the fact that the Chinese government has made it clear that they are willing to commit a significant portion of their military power to keeping the current regime in North Korea is not the most important reason the U.S. has not helped the South Korean government reunite Korea.
Islam is not a people, it is however a culture. And yes people did convert to Islam because they thought it was better than the alternatives...the alternatives being being treated as a second class citizen or killed. And no, my premise does not rest on Islam being a people. My premise rests on the Koran (well, OK not really the Koran since I do not read Arabic and according to Muslims the Koran is only the Koran in Arabic).
You are correct that Joschka Fischer told Donald Rumsfeld that he was not convinced that war with Iraq was the correct thing to do. Right after he had said that Saddam Hussein was a horrible dictator who had weapons of mass destruction.
Historically, and currently, Islam is the most militant of the major religions (abrahamic or otherwise) on the planet. Islam was founded as an ideology of conquest. Islam has been at war as long as it has been in existence. The Crusades were not the start of the war between Christendom and Islam. They were a response to the invasion of the lands of Christendom by Muslims. Muslims did not take control of the area we call Palestine by conversion, they did so by conquest.
If you don't understand that your debt does not increase unless your spending exceeds your income(the definition of "deficit"), then you should really not be allowed to vote.
Colin Powell was assigned to cover up the Mai Lai Massacre and when it became politically convenient to throw the soldiers under the bus, he was perfectly happy to change course and do that instead (which was still a form of cover up, since the report he created protected higher level officers from culpability)
Whoever rated this insightful should go back and read a bit about the alleged claims of WMDs. All knew the claims were false...
Which is why the countries that opposed military intervention in Iraq (mostly because their leaders were being bribed by Saddam Hussein) all said, "Yes, they have WMDs, but lets give sanctions more time."
It has nothing to do with skin color as very similar arguments were used in supporting opposition leaders in Eastern Europe during the Cold War (one difference being that the Soviet Union was in a position to offer more support to those in power in Eastern Europe than those in power in Iran and other places). A similar line of reasoning was used to intervene in the former Yugoslavia when Bill Clinton was in office as well.
Why should they care? The customer base they are targeting buys a new car every three to five years. While some people buy new cars and keep them longer, the bulk of cars that are older than five years old are being driven by someone who is not a customer of the auto-makers (although the expansion of "certified pre-owned" programs may start to change that perception among car manufacturers).
Slashdot Mirror
If voting does not change anything, why do the elderly have outsized influence on America's political system? The best explanation I have seen for that is because they vote.
No, it is like saying she deserved to get raped because she dressed like a hooker, spent time standing on a street corner with a bunch of hookers and got in a car with a strange guy who asked if she wanted to party.
You are correct that it would cost jobs, but offshoring would not get around it. It would be trivial for Congress to pass a law collecting from businesses that sell to consumers from outside of the country and equally trivial to enforce it against any large enough to be a shell for a company that is actually located in the U.S.. The problem is that this law would make it harder for a small business to get started. Existing regulations have made it difficult to start a brick and mortar retail business as a small, fully legal side business, this would extend that difficulty to being an online retailer.
The Pentagon does not pay sales tax.
And a boatload of work for small startup companies. You seem to be unaware that many states do not have a single sales tax rate. Instead some states have a rate that varies according to what municipality you are in at the time of the sale. This is not something that can be determined by zip code as zip codes are not divided by local municipality boundaries but are instead determined by what post office the USPS delivers mail to that address from.
So, in place of the many thousands of startups that will not get started because one more regulatory and financial hurdle has been put in their path, you are proposing that we settle for a single startup and call it a win?
OK, so what you are saying is that people should give up on fixing copyright because people have been talking about doing so for over 100 years and the problem has only gotten worse. Further you are of the opinion that people who propose fixing copyright must be ignorant of the history of attempts to implement the solution they propose because otherwise they would know that fixing copyright was hopeless and give up (ignoring the possibility that people are aware of the history but still hope that maybe they can convince enough people to change things sometime in the future).
To reiterate, you appear to hold the position that our legal system is hopelessly corrupt and we should just give up trying to fix it because most people are completely unaware of the problem and can't be bothered to help fix it.
OK, you claim that because people have been saying that copyright should be limited in duration for a long time and yet legislators keep extending it ever longer, the people who say that it should be limited have no credibility. I do not follow your logic. I guess what you are saying is that we should just accept copyright law as it is, since people have opposed it for a long time.
That is exactly what I was thinking. I am confused as to why the people who are most vocally calling for the ITU to take active control over governance of the Internet are representatives of the governments with the strongest history of actively suppressing freedoms if the only reason for this discussion is to ensure that the Internet remain open.
What are you talking about? People have hated florescent bulbs for as long as I can remember. The reasons varied, but for the most part people hated them.
Perhaps if politicians hadn't made promises they should have known the public wouldn't support in the name of self-same public while pocketing campaign contributions from those who benefited the most from those promise, the public would not be desiring to repudiate those promises now that they are finding out exactly what the politicians promised.
There was little Kodak or Polaroid could do.
This is certainly true of Polaroid, but Kodak, for all intents and purposes, invented digital photography and still failed to capitalize on the technology that made their primary product obsolete.
The US gubmint isn't going to remove him, because he doesn't have any oil, ...
Well, that and the fact that the Chinese government is backing him up with nukes, but sure the key factor is the fact that he doesn't have any oil. I'm sure the fact that the Chinese government has made it clear that they are willing to commit a significant portion of their military power to keeping the current regime in North Korea is not the most important reason the U.S. has not helped the South Korean government reunite Korea.
I have read the English translation of the Koran. As I said, I cannot read the actual Koran since I do not read or speak Arabic.
Islam is not a people, it is however a culture. And yes people did convert to Islam because they thought it was better than the alternatives...the alternatives being being treated as a second class citizen or killed. And no, my premise does not rest on Islam being a people. My premise rests on the Koran (well, OK not really the Koran since I do not read Arabic and according to Muslims the Koran is only the Koran in Arabic).
You are correct that Joschka Fischer told Donald Rumsfeld that he was not convinced that war with Iraq was the correct thing to do. Right after he had said that Saddam Hussein was a horrible dictator who had weapons of mass destruction.
Historically, and currently, Islam is the most militant of the major religions (abrahamic or otherwise) on the planet. Islam was founded as an ideology of conquest. Islam has been at war as long as it has been in existence. The Crusades were not the start of the war between Christendom and Islam. They were a response to the invasion of the lands of Christendom by Muslims. Muslims did not take control of the area we call Palestine by conversion, they did so by conquest.
If you don't understand that your debt does not increase unless your spending exceeds your income(the definition of "deficit"), then you should really not be allowed to vote.
That may be true, but it's also short sighted.
Well, we are talking about car companies here.
So is the good Star Wars stuff from Lucas.
Colin Powell was assigned to cover up the Mai Lai Massacre and when it became politically convenient to throw the soldiers under the bus, he was perfectly happy to change course and do that instead (which was still a form of cover up, since the report he created protected higher level officers from culpability)
Whoever rated this insightful should go back and read a bit about the alleged claims of WMDs. All knew the claims were false...
Which is why the countries that opposed military intervention in Iraq (mostly because their leaders were being bribed by Saddam Hussein) all said, "Yes, they have WMDs, but lets give sanctions more time."
It has nothing to do with skin color as very similar arguments were used in supporting opposition leaders in Eastern Europe during the Cold War (one difference being that the Soviet Union was in a position to offer more support to those in power in Eastern Europe than those in power in Iran and other places). A similar line of reasoning was used to intervene in the former Yugoslavia when Bill Clinton was in office as well.
Is there something similar for obsolete in dash GPS setups?
Why should they care? The customer base they are targeting buys a new car every three to five years. While some people buy new cars and keep them longer, the bulk of cars that are older than five years old are being driven by someone who is not a customer of the auto-makers (although the expansion of "certified pre-owned" programs may start to change that perception among car manufacturers).