I wish I had mod points right now. You make an excellent case for what I believe. There should be copyright for a limited amount of time (at most the life of the author or 25 years, whichever is longer. But the essentially perpetual copyright we have today is ridiculous. It is time for the Walt Disney corporation to find a new cash cow other than Mickey Mouse.
Having read your post, I fail to see why you think that "people" have any inherent value. As far as I can tell, you believe that humans are biological machines. If that is correct what value do they have beyond a sufficiently complex machine. For that matter what is this term "value"? Is it how much money you are willing to spend to obtain one?
You say that the IRS works? Please tell me you know who our new Treasury Secretary is? And that he only paid his taxes because he was about to be nominated as Treasury Secretary (and I think he didn't pay a few that the statute of limitations had run out on, but I may have misread that article).
Sure there are such things, but I used to work for a guy who sold stuff at computer shows. When we went to New York, we would go to shows in "Syracuse", only it wasn't the Syracuse sales tax that was charged because actually we were in the County outside of Syracuse (sorry, if I have the wrong city, but there were two or three places in NY like this). Of course the next "Syracuse" show we went to was actually in the Syracuse tax area. Keeping track of where the local tax lines are drawn is a real pain. Oh yeah, zip codes won't help, the Post Office doesn't use political boundaries to draw zip code boundaries.
You misunderstand what this is about, this isn't about giving brick and mortar retailers a leg up. This is about doing away with the little start up that does business over the Internet. There is no way if I start a business doing sales over the Internet that I can afford to get sales tax registration for all 50 states, but that is not a hardship for someone like Amazon
Actually, if I had a better idea, I would go out and implement it so that I could make money off of it. Which tells you all you need to know about these guys, if they knew what the next big thing was going to be, they would go make money off of it. Since they don't know what it is, they will try to tell us why we shouldn't do it.
I've read the Bible. Its plenty full of a hateful, vengeful, and sociopathic god.
PS. There's no such thing as an atheist fundamentalist. Nearly all don't hold their worldview in stone and are open to changing it if evidence presented warrants it. We are much less of a threat to mankind than the warring religions. We have started none, you have been fighting for thousands of years.
Stalin, Mao. Sorry either one of these atheists overshadow all religious mass murderers put together.
Imagine there's no countries.
It isn't hard to do.
Nothing to kill or die for,
And no religion too.
Imagine all the people,
Living life in peace.
Love,
Sane People
You mean like in the Soviet Union under Stalin? Or China under Mao? or Cambodia under Pol Pot?
Christianity was once a barbaric and primitive religion, but then went through a renaissance.
When will Islam move out of the stone age and have a Renaissance of its own?
I am not sure I agree with your first sentence. But there is an important difference between Christianity and Islam: the barbarism and violence of Islam is based on their most authoritative scripture the Koran. Christianity's most authoritative scripture contains such admonitions to violence as "If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn the other." If you think there is equivalence between the two, please cite the New Testament reference calling for the faithful to kill anyone.
I have a friend who makes his living with an Internet business. He tried three or four things before he hit upon what he is doing now. If he had to get a new "tax card" every time he changed his business plan, it would not have been worth his time to try the first several ideas. If he hadn't tried the first several ideas he would not have learned what led him to the one that is successful.
I know of people who have done similar things with non-Internet businesses.
In those countries where you get a new "tax card" before trying a new business opportunity, what do you do when the business doesn't make any money and you want to give it up?
Actually the melody is NO LONGER covered by copyright. The melody comes from the song "Good Morning to All", which is no longer under copyright. So while the song "Happy Birthday to You" is still claimed to be under copyright, the melody is not. (There is significant reason to believe that the copyright on "Happy Birthday to You" would not hold up in court).
Especially when you consider that the first publication of the song "Happy Birthday to You" was in 1912. The current "owner" of the copyright claims that it will extend until 2030 and that any public performance of the song without paying royalties is illegal.
The truth is, your fact is useless unless we can rule out other reasons why gun violence is more prevalent in areas with lower legal gun ownership rates -- and you'd be hard pressed to do so, unless you're able to do what the huge resources of the NRA have been unable to do for decades.
Except that there have been studies that show that gun violence in specific areas declines after laws restricting gun ownership have been removed. So, why is that?
You claim that the Uk is evidence for your claim that when gun ownership goes down, deaths go down. I gave you the numbers for homicides in the UK in 2006/2007 versus 1997/1998. Those numbers refute your argument that reducing gun ownership reduces senseless deaths, you respond with an article about a single nutjob in Pittsburgh.
So, you claim that if there are fewer force multipliers lying around less senseless deaths occur. I claim that guns are a large reason why we see the steady expansion of freedom in recent history. When the best weapons out there required innate physical skills and years of training to master even the fundamentals, those with wealth will lord it over those without to a degree that we find hard to imagine in the industrialized world today.
In the 60's (and early 70's), conventional thinking among scientists was that the Big Bang was wrong because it lent too much support to Creationists. At that time a lot of people viewed the Big Bang the same way that people today view ID (I'm not trying to imply any more similarity between the two than that simple fact).
In 1997-98 (the year that the UK implemented a new more draconian hand gun ban) their were 609 homicides in the UK. In 2006-7, there were 734 homicides in the UK. That is going from a murder rate of about 10 per million of population to a murder rate of about 12 per million of population. So, care to try again?
Maybe that's because many of us felt that presidents should not be chosen by the Supreme Court, especially when that choice runs contrary to the popular vote. Bush's re-election was more disturbing to me because he clearly had more Americans behind him (but why, I don't know).
There are two important things here. First we do not know who won the "popular vote" because many states left uncounted many absentee ballots. These ballots weren't counted because in those states they were fewer than the margin currently separating the candidates. There were a lot more (legitimately) uncounted absentee ballots than the margin reported between Gore and Bush in the "popular vote".
Second, if the Supreme Court had not stepped in, the election would have either gone to Bush anyway, or it would have gone to Congress under the provisions of the Constitution for an election where no one gets a majority of the Electoral College (best case scenario for Al Gore when the Supreme Court intervened was for Florida Electors to not be seated). If Congress had decided the outcome, once again Bush is President (Republicans controlled Congress at the time). There is no legitimate scenario where Al Gore ends up as President.
Several Democratic leaning organizations conducted their own recount of the Florida votes, they concluded that George W. Bush got the majority of the votes in Florida.
There is one more point about that election, most of the major networks called Florida for Al Gore before the polls closed on the panhandle (they had all promised not to call any states before that states polls closed before the election). The panhandle of Florida votes much stronger Republican than the rest of the state. Studies have shown that people are significantly less likely to go to the polls if they are convinced that the outcome of the election is already decided.
You make a good point but there is more to it than that. If you read the article closely, you discover that the male chimps in the study seem to share with one specific female chimp (the article mentions pair-bonding).
I have seen several of these studies and they all seem to conclude that all behavior is entered into with a "what's in it for me" attitude.
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I wish I had mod points right now. You make an excellent case for what I believe. There should be copyright for a limited amount of time (at most the life of the author or 25 years, whichever is longer. But the essentially perpetual copyright we have today is ridiculous. It is time for the Walt Disney corporation to find a new cash cow other than Mickey Mouse.
Having read your post, I fail to see why you think that "people" have any inherent value. As far as I can tell, you believe that humans are biological machines. If that is correct what value do they have beyond a sufficiently complex machine. For that matter what is this term "value"? Is it how much money you are willing to spend to obtain one?
You say that the IRS works? Please tell me you know who our new Treasury Secretary is? And that he only paid his taxes because he was about to be nominated as Treasury Secretary (and I think he didn't pay a few that the statute of limitations had run out on, but I may have misread that article).
Sure there are such things, but I used to work for a guy who sold stuff at computer shows. When we went to New York, we would go to shows in "Syracuse", only it wasn't the Syracuse sales tax that was charged because actually we were in the County outside of Syracuse (sorry, if I have the wrong city, but there were two or three places in NY like this). Of course the next "Syracuse" show we went to was actually in the Syracuse tax area. Keeping track of where the local tax lines are drawn is a real pain. Oh yeah, zip codes won't help, the Post Office doesn't use political boundaries to draw zip code boundaries.
You misunderstand what this is about, this isn't about giving brick and mortar retailers a leg up. This is about doing away with the little start up that does business over the Internet. There is no way if I start a business doing sales over the Internet that I can afford to get sales tax registration for all 50 states, but that is not a hardship for someone like Amazon
Actually, if I had a better idea, I would go out and implement it so that I could make money off of it. Which tells you all you need to know about these guys, if they knew what the next big thing was going to be, they would go make money off of it. Since they don't know what it is, they will try to tell us why we shouldn't do it.
So, turn off your computer and stop using electricity. That way you can do your part to reduce CO2 emission.
I've read the Bible. Its plenty full of a hateful, vengeful, and sociopathic god.
PS. There's no such thing as an atheist fundamentalist. Nearly all don't hold their worldview in stone and are open to changing it if evidence presented warrants it. We are much less of a threat to mankind than the warring religions. We have started none, you have been fighting for thousands of years.
Stalin, Mao. Sorry either one of these atheists overshadow all religious mass murderers put together.
They may be late comers, but compared to them every religious mass murderer was an amateur.
Imagine there's no countries. It isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion too. Imagine all the people, Living life in peace. Love, Sane People
You mean like in the Soviet Union under Stalin? Or China under Mao? or Cambodia under Pol Pot?
Adventists aren't considered part of the "Evangelical Christian" movement either.
Christianity was once a barbaric and primitive religion, but then went through a renaissance.
When will Islam move out of the stone age and have a Renaissance of its own?
I am not sure I agree with your first sentence. But there is an important difference between Christianity and Islam: the barbarism and violence of Islam is based on their most authoritative scripture the Koran. Christianity's most authoritative scripture contains such admonitions to violence as "If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn the other." If you think there is equivalence between the two, please cite the New Testament reference calling for the faithful to kill anyone.
Yes, and then we get to the real mass murderers: atheists (look up Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.).
I have a friend who makes his living with an Internet business. He tried three or four things before he hit upon what he is doing now. If he had to get a new "tax card" every time he changed his business plan, it would not have been worth his time to try the first several ideas. If he hadn't tried the first several ideas he would not have learned what led him to the one that is successful.
I know of people who have done similar things with non-Internet businesses.
In those countries where you get a new "tax card" before trying a new business opportunity, what do you do when the business doesn't make any money and you want to give it up?
It makes me sick that Obama changed his policy on warrantless wiretapping.
He didn't change anything, he just stopped lying about it.
Actually the melody is NO LONGER covered by copyright. The melody comes from the song "Good Morning to All", which is no longer under copyright. So while the song "Happy Birthday to You" is still claimed to be under copyright, the melody is not. (There is significant reason to believe that the copyright on "Happy Birthday to You" would not hold up in court).
Especially when you consider that the first publication of the song "Happy Birthday to You" was in 1912. The current "owner" of the copyright claims that it will extend until 2030 and that any public performance of the song without paying royalties is illegal.
The truth is, your fact is useless unless we can rule out other reasons why gun violence is more prevalent in areas with lower legal gun ownership rates -- and you'd be hard pressed to do so, unless you're able to do what the huge resources of the NRA have been unable to do for decades.
Except that there have been studies that show that gun violence in specific areas declines after laws restricting gun ownership have been removed. So, why is that?
You claim that the Uk is evidence for your claim that when gun ownership goes down, deaths go down. I gave you the numbers for homicides in the UK in 2006/2007 versus 1997/1998. Those numbers refute your argument that reducing gun ownership reduces senseless deaths, you respond with an article about a single nutjob in Pittsburgh.
So, you claim that if there are fewer force multipliers lying around less senseless deaths occur. I claim that guns are a large reason why we see the steady expansion of freedom in recent history. When the best weapons out there required innate physical skills and years of training to master even the fundamentals, those with wealth will lord it over those without to a degree that we find hard to imagine in the industrialized world today.
In the 60's (and early 70's), conventional thinking among scientists was that the Big Bang was wrong because it lent too much support to Creationists. At that time a lot of people viewed the Big Bang the same way that people today view ID (I'm not trying to imply any more similarity between the two than that simple fact).
In 1997-98 (the year that the UK implemented a new more draconian hand gun ban) their were 609 homicides in the UK. In 2006-7, there were 734 homicides in the UK. That is going from a murder rate of about 10 per million of population to a murder rate of about 12 per million of population. So, care to try again?
Really, we had forced work camps under Bush? Jews were rounded up just for being Jews?
Maybe that's because many of us felt that presidents should not be chosen by the Supreme Court, especially when that choice runs contrary to the popular vote. Bush's re-election was more disturbing to me because he clearly had more Americans behind him (but why, I don't know).
There are two important things here. First we do not know who won the "popular vote" because many states left uncounted many absentee ballots. These ballots weren't counted because in those states they were fewer than the margin currently separating the candidates. There were a lot more (legitimately) uncounted absentee ballots than the margin reported between Gore and Bush in the "popular vote".
Second, if the Supreme Court had not stepped in, the election would have either gone to Bush anyway, or it would have gone to Congress under the provisions of the Constitution for an election where no one gets a majority of the Electoral College (best case scenario for Al Gore when the Supreme Court intervened was for Florida Electors to not be seated). If Congress had decided the outcome, once again Bush is President (Republicans controlled Congress at the time). There is no legitimate scenario where Al Gore ends up as President.
Several Democratic leaning organizations conducted their own recount of the Florida votes, they concluded that George W. Bush got the majority of the votes in Florida.
There is one more point about that election, most of the major networks called Florida for Al Gore before the polls closed on the panhandle (they had all promised not to call any states before that states polls closed before the election). The panhandle of Florida votes much stronger Republican than the rest of the state. Studies have shown that people are significantly less likely to go to the polls if they are convinced that the outcome of the election is already decided.
Please provide a link to a study demonstrating that.
You make a good point but there is more to it than that. If you read the article closely, you discover that the male chimps in the study seem to share with one specific female chimp (the article mentions pair-bonding).
I have seen several of these studies and they all seem to conclude that all behavior is entered into with a "what's in it for me" attitude.