"Sounds REALLY interesting, but hacks like some of our Democratic Presidential hopefuls will want to make hay on the morbidity end of it instead of the usefulness of putting the nation's collective thinking into the war against terror."
Neocons... neocons. You really can't take any criticism of your religion, can you? No shades of gray, only white. Democrats = communists = traitors = evil. Republicans = freetrade = plusgood.
How do you war against "Terror"? What the hell is "Terror"? Terror is an emotion felt by you. I don't feel particularly terrorized, and I don't want the Constitution eliminated because I feel afraid.
Is it really a war against brown Moslems? If not, what the hell are you warring against? bin Laden and his cultists blew up some buildings. Find him. Oh, I must be a Democrat and a fool, 'cause I point out that we haven't found him, but Bush is blowing up brown Iraqis who sort of look like bin Laden, if he weren't a Saudi, rich, and oh yes, still not found.
"Terror" is a nonsense mouth noise with no semantic referent. It was coined to mean anything, so it is used to justify anything.
Any criticism of the necons is now damaging the war on "Terror". Which is undefined and undefinable. So... therefore, anything Bush's critics say must dangerous, counterproductive, traitorous, and shouted down as much as possible for the safety of the U.S.
And, oh yes: since the War on Terror is undefined and meaningless, it can never, ever end. Critics must shut up -- forever. As a matter of fact, locking them up is a good idea. Or let's execute a few of them, as Coulter says, so the others will think twice about becoming traitors.
As I have read it, that SCC vs. SPR decision has historically been misremembered.
A Supreme Court clerk actually wrote the language describing the corporations as individuals. But somehow, it has always been remembered as a SCOTUS decision.
A misrepresentation over decades has created the Corporation as a Legal Individual?
Watch the video on the Tango's homepage. The driver is slaloming through it all like a maniac -- and the car remains upright. It's so stable, it's frightening.
Another car, later in the video, tries to duplicate the Tango's moves -- and the car damn near flips over. BOTH wheels on one side fly off the ground. And that was a normally proportioned car. An SUV would have slammed into a rollover.
I love that little car! I'd rather it were closer to the ground, like a torpedo, but having a motorcycle's height does have visibility advantages.
Interesting... I never noticed until I read this thread the following fact: SUV owners are not only relying on their mass and rigidity to survive impact with the inferior sized cars -- they are using the smaller cars as crumple zones!
The SUV owners are using other people and their cars as crushable cushions! An external crumple zone.
This is selfishness gone to the nth degree. We've lost part of our humanity in the U.S., haven't we, when we can justify using other people as crash damage attenuation. And then blame them for being stupid enough to get in the way.
Hm. I see a pattern in this. Whenever safety us an issue, the standard seems to be: can it survive an impact with an SUV?
Very few things can. Thing is: why should they have to?
What we have is an escalating war of mass. The SUV owners are somewhat safer, barring obnoxious driving habits, because they crush anything that hits them, and shield the driver. So, what is the logical outcome of this mass war? 10,000 pound station wagons.
Mayhap the problem is not with the inability of the microcars (which are cool -- tho I'd like something more like a torpedo) to take the impact, but that people are driving gigantic vehicles that, though protecting their own butts, are guaranteeing instant death for anyone unfortunate enough to hit them.
Point -- the danger inherent is driving a Tango isn't that the Tango is unsafe -- it seems nimble and safe enough -- it's the unenlightened self-interest of those who want to be safe at the expense of other drivers' safety.
California did not have a "power crisis". There was plenty of power. What it did have was a pack of politically-protected liars and thieves manipulating the market to jack California for five billion somolians.
"In 18th century America, any yokel could pick up his trusty rifled musket and go fight agin the Gummint (see the Whiskey Rebellion [earlyamerica.com] etc)."
I recall one bemused Indian IT executive saying "When will it end? Will they finally find someone who works for free?"
I thought that funny, until I remembered our propensity for locking everyone up... imagine all these new prisoners generated by the RIAA lawsuits being trained in tech, and slinging code for 25 cents a day -- in jail.
"Historians will look back at the US and wonder why in the hell corn farmers had such a huge impact on the policies of the most powerful nation in the world. "
And most don't pay even 26%. The play games with expenses and amortization. They have no taxable income.
Microsoft, for instance, doesn't pay federal taxes. 45 billion in cash reserves, and they don't show a profit.
I'm tired of the "poor little rich people" line of the neocons. Rich people barely pay taxes. Rich corporations barely pay taxes, and as a matter of fact, can get rebates on taxes they never paid in the first place.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Annotations Rights Retained by the People
Aside from contending that a bill of rights was unnecessary, the Federalists responded to those opposing ratification of the Constitution because of the lack of a declaration of fundamental rights by arguing that inasmuch as it would be impossible to list all rights it would be dangerous to list some because there would be those who would seize on the absence of the omitted rights to assert that government was unrestrained as to those. 1 Madison adverted to this argument in presenting his proposed amendments to the House of Representatives. ''It has been objected also against a bill of rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration; and it might follow by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were consequently insecure. This is one of the most plausible arguments I have ever heard against the admission of a bill of rights into this system; but, I conceive, that it may be guarded against. I have attempted it, as gentlemen may see by turning to the last clause of the fourth resolution.'' 2 It is clear from its text and from Madison's statement that the Amendment states but a rule of construction, making clear that a Bill of Rights might not by implication be taken to increase the powers of the national government in areas not enumerated, and that it does not contain within itself any guarantee of a right or a proscription of an infringement. 3 Recently, however, the Amendment has been construed to be positive affirmation of the existence of rights which are not enumerated but which are nonetheless protected by other provisions.
----
In other words, in order to protect the First Amendment rights of an individual, a right to privacy must be construed, else, as my "First Amendment Zone" abuse citation illustrates, there is no First Amendment right to free speech, if the speaker knows that his identity is being serriptitiously deduced and cataloged by opponents in the government, presumably to harrass or destroy the speaker.
The Ninth implies rights necessary to enable the enumerated rights. It denies the goverment the ability to increase its powers in the areas not enumerated, if those new powers exist soley to disable enumerated rights.
The government was scaled back under Clinton. Possibly the only time it ever happened.
Government spending was slashed, the budget balanced, and the debt was paid down.
Now, we are building a perfect, giganticly expensive police state -- on the Federal credit card.
Trillions of dollats in tax cuts for the wealthy, tracking mechanisms for the not-wealthy, and trillions of dollars of debt interest payments for the wealthy. It's a Perfect World... for Cheney, and the Bushes, and Gates, and anyone else who's megarich.
You and I get a tracking chip in our femurs. Yep, it'll happen. But wealthy people won't have them, or need them.
And we won't be the slightest bit "safer".
So why ARE we building this police state again? And remember, the police state will be the whole world. And we pay for it.
And please tell me where it says I don't have a right to demonstrate anonymously?
The very concept of free speech revolves around anonymity. Pamphleting was upheld by the Supreme court to be a necessarily anonymous activity, for the pamphleteer could be subject to persecution (think Tom Paine).
There won't be any protests if the protesters know that a mad administration is cataloging their names. And that's the whole idea of cataloging the protestors... isn't it? To get them off the streets, and shut them up.
This administration already has come up with the idea of a "first amendment zone". You see, if the Appointed President is scheduled to show up in public, the Secret Service calls the local law. The local law will set up a pen, usuallly a mile or more away from the AP's speech location, in which all protestors are required to stay.
Needless to say, Republicans are bussed in from the burbs if necessary to swell the AP's crowd numbers. And no protestors are in evidence.
Back in the Pen, or First Amendment Zone, the cops and the Secret Service set up cameras on tripods and recording equipment galore, all pointedly pointing at the traitorous ones.
Imagine if Clinton had penned up and cataloged the Monicaites. I can't imagine it, 'cause the local law and the SS would never have done it. But for a 'publican? No problemo!
In such a situation, privacy is obviously being removed in order to intimidate any future protestors from ever trying to protest Bush ever again.
After all, imagine what could be done with that info the SS are gathering. Employers could be called, a goodly majority of which are hard-right 'publicans. A large number of people in the U.S. have been fired already because they disagreed with Bush in public. That info is obviously going into an "enemies of conservatives" file somewhere, as well. Who has this info? WHY do they have it, and who the hell told them they could pen up people and catalog their identities?
Where the hell are the reporters? No one seems to care.
This is why the Ninth Amendment regarding unlisted rights not specifically enumerated exists: the right to privacy does indeed exist, altho not listed specifically. The government is not only bound by rights enumerated, but implied.
If this does not seem to go over well with the radical right, then we do need to enumerate our rights with new laws. The pity is, those laws can be rescinded, whereas the Constitution cannot be, easily anyway.
You own the physical objects -- the negatives, the paper photographs themselves. You are granted the right, for a limited time, to grant licenses to copy those images.
BUT -- you do not own the images. The images are not property. A copy of the image is not theft, for you do not own the image.
IF someone steals your physical property, theft is committed. If someone copies the photos, it is a copyright violation, which is a civil offense which should carry no criminal penalties, only monetary ones as determinted by a court.
I know it is common for artists and corporations to think that ideas or words or images are their property. But those things are not property.
Copyright was instituted to insure that, for a limited time, creators of new art could receive money for their work, *in order to increase the body of art and knowledge for all*. The idea was not to create a new body of property. Copyright exists to reward effort, for a limited time, and then, *the ideas or art are released for the good of all*.
The U.S. for most of its history refused to honor the copyrights of any other nation, much less consider such as property. Only in the 20th century did the idea of "intellectual property" arise. It is a new idea, a meme that could eventually retard science, medicine, art, politics, teaching, the list is endless.
One of the first proponents of "IP" on the net was Scientology, who initiated the first IP lawsuits against netizens back in the early '90's. The cult wanted to stop ex-members from talking about what they had been told, what they had read, based on the idea that the cult "owned" all that information as a trade secret. They've been the major backer of the DMCA and the new copyright police state.
You can't own patterns of information, which is what content actually is. But a new regime in the U.S. wants to create this new law, and they are getting away with it by selling the idea that they are protecting artists.
They aren't. Artists have historically been robbed, in payments for books, TV, music, movies, you name it. Artists who want to view their work as property are actually selling their souls to immortal corporations which will actually own the works in perpetuity.
Viewing artistic works as property will ruin the artists themselves. Keep copyright laws as they should be: don't give the major corportate powers the ability to acquire ownership of all the works of man -- for all eternity.
I was one of the first posters, Einsteins, so the others were redundant.
And I guess all those dead men, women, and children were indeed redundant. We've fixed that. Huzzah for us. Now they can die of disentery; more redundancy removed!
You Bushies really can't take anyone saying "no", can you?
"but that artists should get paid for what they do."
Again and again it must be said: Artists are not getting paid for their music -- not the vast, vast majority.
The music corporations are eating all of the money. And the artists cannot, by law, force their publishers to open the books to check the accounting -- a singular exception to normal business law.
The latest in such gall is the news that the music companies are now demanding a part of the concert income -- up to now, the only way a musician can really make any money. Why? Music piracy, of course! They demand to make up income "stolen" from them by pirates by grabbing a percentage of the concert take!
Even BusinessWeek is babbling about the music industry's loss of cash from piracy -- without giving a thought to the ideas that 1) we're in an economic meltdown, and 2) the recording industry cut production in the last two years, so of bloody course they have lower sales!
Artists are the very last people to be paid. Paying for a CD rarely pays an artist -- you're just feeding his jailor. If you want to support an artist, go to a concert.
Downloading MP3's isn't hurting the artists one damned bit. It's hurting the thieves that are robbing them of all their labor. Simply put, downloading doesn't hurt anyone important.
"I repeat... I... did not... have sexual relations with that woman..."
"And it is none of your goddamned fucking business, you hypocritical, amoral, lecherous, power-hungry lying fuckers. Get off my back. Shut the fuck up. I'm trying to kill Osama bin Laden, whom you claim is not a problem. I don't have time for this unbelieveable bullshit."
Not a dumbass. Russert had a change of heart years ago. And he was personally courted by General Electric's hyperconservative CEO Walsh to be NBC's pocket "liberal" on Meet the Press. Russert took every care to assassinate Clinton's presidency, while tippy-toeing around Bush's as though it were wired with grenades. The man sold out years ago.
Additionally, I think people have completely forgotten what "liberal" and "conservative" mean. Russert and Bush are not conservatives: they are neocons, closet corporate radicals. Most Americans hold classic liberal values; they simply have been brainwashed into hating the name.
No, the main thing with Bush is 8-10 thousand dead people, and tens of thousands with their limbs and faces blown off. But I agree with you of course. It's amazing how insane most people's priorities are. Blowjob, supremely important: thousands of murdered people, insignificant.
It's not going to happen again. The reason why three of the the four hijacked planes hit the attackers' targets is this: no one on the planes, not the pilots, not the passengers, not the attendents, had an inkling that the hijackers were intent on crashing the planes. It had never happened before.
Standard procedure for a hijacking is to cooperate with the hijackers to minimize harm to the people on the plane.
If the people on a hijacked plane know that they are on a doomed aircraft, the attackers have no leverage. The Pennsylvania flight was different from the other three in that the passengers ignored the-plane-will-crash-if-we-use-cellphones rule, called their families, got the lowdown, and then attacked the terrorists. The terrorists lost. The mission failed.
Mr. Shoe-Bomb also failed because the passengers gang-beat his ass. Mission failed.
Every plane hijacked in the future will have passengers that will not cooperate. The pilots won't cooperate. Missions to use airliners as bombs are now useless: any sane attacker will of course now use other methods.
Creating softwalls and turning our country into a AA-covered bunker is idiotic. Attacks via planes can't succeed. At the very least, the pilots will slam the plane into a field to save the lives of thousands.
I worry at the irrationality of the actions of the people of the U.S. Shutdown of the Constitution. Illegal attacks against non-threatening countries. Concentration camp in Cuba, complete with execution chamber (coming soon). Cameras everywhere. Reading everyone's mail.
You know, the attackers communicated face-to-face, so NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE STOPPED THEM.
We're turning the U.S. into an prison populated by people constantly agitated by their warden into a state of hysterical paranoia.
Listen, the people who really, really wanted to blow us up died in the planes. They are dead. They aren't in Iraq. They aren't everyone who speaks Arabic. They aren't being tortured in little white jail cells across the U.S.
Any future attack will come from a different front. And frankly, these men aren't that bright: they're cultists to begin with, so 9/10 of their brain cells are useless anyway.
The few loonies who want to attack us will do so no matter how many cameras are over our beds. Now, on the other hand, by attacking non-combatants all over the world, Bush Inc. has converted infinite good will into an implacable wall of resistance, not because of what we are, or the insanity of our enemies, but because of what we have done to people who had nothing to do with the 911 attackers. 2,000-10,000 dead in Iraq: Perle and Wolfowitz refuse to give an accounting. Bush has insulted and alienated the entire world when previously he had them firmly on our side. He's like John Adams wandering into Paris in the 1770's, who insulted and patronized the very people Franklin had so carefully cultivated into supporting the U.S. Adams, like Bush, nearly lost the war by his gross incompentency in diplomacy, his raw moral fanaticism, his ignorance of other nation's cultures, and his blind nationalism.
Soft walls won't save us from Bush's stupidlity in dealing with, well, ANYTHING.
Wait a minute... what's that sound? I hear a faint...
screaming in the distance...
Ah, the entertainment corporations are screaming like they are giving birth to a hairbrush. Anally.
The next sound you hear will be that of legislators passing laws outlawing repiping of TV signals over the Internet. It'll be mixed up with the sounds of broadcasters and cable/satellite companies firing fusilades of cash.
That "pimple" will make all the chip manufacturers comply with DRM, or face criminal charges. Arrogance in the face of the truly fanatical is costly.
Apple and IBM will comply, once the consumers shrug their collective shoulders. Americans are good at shrugging their shoulders. Just look at what happened in the last three months.
Slashdot Mirror
"Sounds REALLY interesting, but hacks like some of our Democratic Presidential hopefuls will want to make hay on the morbidity end of it instead of the usefulness of putting the nation's collective thinking into the war against terror."
Neocons... neocons. You really can't take any criticism of your religion, can you? No shades of gray, only white. Democrats = communists = traitors = evil. Republicans = freetrade = plusgood.
How do you war against "Terror"? What the hell is "Terror"? Terror is an emotion felt by you. I don't feel particularly terrorized, and I don't want the Constitution eliminated because I feel afraid.
Is it really a war against brown Moslems? If not, what the hell are you warring against? bin Laden and his cultists blew up some buildings. Find him. Oh, I must be a Democrat and a fool, 'cause I point out that we haven't found him, but Bush is blowing up brown Iraqis who sort of look like bin Laden, if he weren't a Saudi, rich, and oh yes, still not found.
"Terror" is a nonsense mouth noise with no semantic referent. It was coined to mean anything, so it is used to justify anything.
Any criticism of the necons is now damaging the war on "Terror". Which is undefined and undefinable. So... therefore, anything Bush's critics say must dangerous, counterproductive, traitorous, and shouted down as much as possible for the safety of the U.S.
And, oh yes: since the War on Terror is undefined and meaningless, it can never, ever end. Critics must shut up -- forever. As a matter of fact, locking them up is a good idea. Or let's execute a few of them, as Coulter says, so the others will think twice about becoming traitors.
As I have read it, that SCC vs. SPR decision has historically been misremembered.
A Supreme Court clerk actually wrote the language describing the corporations as individuals. But somehow, it has always been remembered as a SCOTUS decision.
A misrepresentation over decades has created the Corporation as a Legal Individual?
And people wonder why I'm so dark.
Watch the video on the Tango's homepage. The driver is slaloming through it all like a maniac -- and the car remains upright. It's so stable, it's frightening.
Another car, later in the video, tries to duplicate the Tango's moves -- and the car damn near flips over. BOTH wheels on one side fly off the ground. And that was a normally proportioned car. An SUV would have slammed into a rollover.
I love that little car! I'd rather it were closer to the ground, like a torpedo, but having a motorcycle's height does have visibility advantages.
Great engineering!
Interesting... I never noticed until I read this thread the following fact: SUV owners are not only relying on their mass and rigidity to survive impact with the inferior sized cars -- they are using the smaller cars as crumple zones!
The SUV owners are using other people and their cars as crushable cushions! An external crumple zone.
This is selfishness gone to the nth degree. We've lost part of our humanity in the U.S., haven't we, when we can justify using other people as crash damage attenuation. And then blame them for being stupid enough to get in the way.
Hm. I see a pattern in this. Whenever safety us an issue, the standard seems to be: can it survive an impact with an SUV?
Very few things can. Thing is: why should they have to?
What we have is an escalating war of mass. The SUV owners are somewhat safer, barring obnoxious driving habits, because they crush anything that hits them, and shield the driver. So, what is the logical outcome of this mass war? 10,000 pound station wagons.
Mayhap the problem is not with the inability of the microcars (which are cool -- tho I'd like something more like a torpedo) to take the impact, but that people are driving gigantic vehicles that, though protecting their own butts, are guaranteeing instant death for anyone unfortunate enough to hit them.
Point -- the danger inherent is driving a Tango isn't that the Tango is unsafe -- it seems nimble and safe enough -- it's the unenlightened self-interest of those who want to be safe at the expense of other drivers' safety.
California did not have a "power crisis". There was plenty of power. What it did have was a pack of politically-protected liars and thieves manipulating the market to jack California for five billion somolians.
And no one is in jail.
"In 18th century America, any yokel could pick up his trusty rifled musket and go fight agin the Gummint (see the Whiskey Rebellion [earlyamerica.com] etc)."
They lost.
It would be a fine justice, and I did think of it. But here's the kicker no one has mentioned so far:
D 85 730F378626C3256C21004BA935?OpenDocument
Indian IT labor is now too expensive!
The work is now starting to flow to the former eastern bloc counties, as well as Russia! The workers there charge half of what the Indians do!
http://www.ariasys.com/A5580C/TheSite.nsf/0/E99
I recall one bemused Indian IT executive saying "When will it end? Will they finally find someone who works for free?"
I thought that funny, until I remembered our propensity for locking everyone up... imagine all these new prisoners generated by the RIAA lawsuits being trained in tech, and slinging code for 25 cents a day -- in jail.
Don't laugh. Slaves are the ultimate money saver.
"Historians will look back at the US and wonder why in the hell corn farmers had such a huge impact on the policies of the most powerful nation in the world. "
Two words: Electoral College.
And most don't pay even 26%. The play games with expenses and amortization. They have no taxable income.
Microsoft, for instance, doesn't pay federal taxes. 45 billion in cash reserves, and they don't show a profit.
I'm tired of the "poor little rich people" line of the neocons. Rich people barely pay taxes. Rich corporations barely pay taxes, and as a matter of fact, can get rebates on taxes they never paid in the first place.
Only poor suckers pay taxes on their income.
Once again, the Ninth Amendment of the Constitution:
m endment09/
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/a
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Annotations
Rights Retained by the People
Aside from contending that a bill of rights was unnecessary, the Federalists responded to those opposing ratification of the Constitution because of the lack of a declaration of fundamental rights by arguing that inasmuch as it would be impossible to list all rights it would be dangerous to list some because there would be those who would seize on the absence of the omitted rights to assert that government was unrestrained as to those. 1 Madison adverted to this argument in presenting his proposed amendments to the House of Representatives. ''It has been objected also against a bill of rights, that, by enumerating particular exceptions to the grant of power, it would disparage those rights which were not placed in that enumeration; and it might follow by implication, that those rights which were not singled out, were intended to be assigned into the hands of the General Government, and were consequently insecure. This is one of the most plausible arguments I have ever heard against the admission of a bill of rights into this system; but, I conceive, that it may be guarded against. I have attempted it, as gentlemen may see by turning to the last clause of the fourth resolution.'' 2 It is clear from its text and from Madison's statement that the Amendment states but a rule of construction, making clear that a Bill of Rights might not by implication be taken to increase the powers of the national government in areas not enumerated, and that it does not contain within itself any guarantee of a right or a proscription of an infringement. 3 Recently, however, the Amendment has been construed to be positive affirmation of the existence of rights which are not enumerated but which are nonetheless protected by other provisions.
----
In other words, in order to protect the First Amendment rights of an individual, a right to privacy must be construed, else, as my "First Amendment Zone" abuse citation illustrates, there is no First Amendment right to free speech, if the speaker knows that his identity is being serriptitiously deduced and cataloged by opponents in the government, presumably to harrass or destroy the speaker.
The Ninth implies rights necessary to enable the enumerated rights. It denies the goverment the ability to increase its powers in the areas not enumerated, if those new powers exist soley to disable enumerated rights.
The government was scaled back under Clinton. Possibly the only time it ever happened.
Government spending was slashed, the budget balanced, and the debt was paid down.
Now, we are building a perfect, giganticly expensive police state -- on the Federal credit card.
Trillions of dollats in tax cuts for the wealthy, tracking mechanisms for the not-wealthy, and trillions of dollars of debt interest payments for the wealthy. It's a Perfect World... for Cheney, and the Bushes, and Gates, and anyone else who's megarich.
You and I get a tracking chip in our femurs. Yep, it'll happen. But wealthy people won't have them, or need them.
And we won't be the slightest bit "safer".
So why ARE we building this police state again? And remember, the police state will be the whole world. And we pay for it.
And please tell me where it says I don't have a right to demonstrate anonymously?
The very concept of free speech revolves around anonymity. Pamphleting was upheld by the Supreme court to be a necessarily anonymous activity, for the pamphleteer could be subject to persecution (think Tom Paine).
There won't be any protests if the protesters know that a mad administration is cataloging their names. And that's the whole idea of cataloging the protestors... isn't it? To get them off the streets, and shut them up.
This administration already has come up with the idea of a "first amendment zone". You see, if the Appointed President is scheduled to show up in public, the Secret Service calls the local law. The local law will set up a pen, usuallly a mile or more away from the AP's speech location, in which all protestors are required to stay.
Needless to say, Republicans are bussed in from the burbs if necessary to swell the AP's crowd numbers. And no protestors are in evidence.
Back in the Pen, or First Amendment Zone, the cops and the Secret Service set up cameras on tripods and recording equipment galore, all pointedly pointing at the traitorous ones.
Imagine if Clinton had penned up and cataloged the Monicaites. I can't imagine it, 'cause the local law and the SS would never have done it. But for a 'publican? No problemo!
In such a situation, privacy is obviously being removed in order to intimidate any future protestors from ever trying to protest Bush ever again.
After all, imagine what could be done with that info the SS are gathering. Employers could be called, a goodly majority of which are hard-right 'publicans. A large number of people in the U.S. have been fired already because they disagreed with Bush in public. That info is obviously going into an "enemies of conservatives" file somewhere, as well. Who has this info? WHY do they have it, and who the hell told them they could pen up people and catalog their identities?
Where the hell are the reporters? No one seems to care.
This is why the Ninth Amendment regarding unlisted rights not specifically enumerated exists: the right to privacy does indeed exist, altho not listed specifically. The government is not only bound by rights enumerated, but implied.
If this does not seem to go over well with the radical right, then we do need to enumerate our rights with new laws. The pity is, those laws can be rescinded, whereas the Constitution cannot be, easily anyway.
You own the physical objects -- the negatives, the paper photographs themselves. You are granted the right, for a limited time, to grant licenses to copy those images.
BUT -- you do not own the images. The images are not property. A copy of the image is not theft, for you do not own the image.
IF someone steals your physical property, theft is committed. If someone copies the photos, it is a copyright violation, which is a civil offense which should carry no criminal penalties, only monetary ones as determinted by a court.
I know it is common for artists and corporations to think that ideas or words or images are their property. But those things are not property.
Copyright was instituted to insure that, for a limited time, creators of new art could receive money for their work, *in order to increase the body of art and knowledge for all*. The idea was not to create a new body of property. Copyright exists to reward effort, for a limited time, and then, *the ideas or art are released for the good of all*.
The U.S. for most of its history refused to honor the copyrights of any other nation, much less consider such as property. Only in the 20th century did the idea of "intellectual property" arise. It is a new idea, a meme that could eventually retard science, medicine, art, politics, teaching, the list is endless.
One of the first proponents of "IP" on the net was Scientology, who initiated the first IP lawsuits against netizens back in the early '90's. The cult wanted to stop ex-members from talking about what they had been told, what they had read, based on the idea that the cult "owned" all that information as a trade secret. They've been the major backer of the DMCA and the new copyright police state.
You can't own patterns of information, which is what content actually is. But a new regime in the U.S. wants to create this new law, and they are getting away with it by selling the idea that they are protecting artists.
They aren't. Artists have historically been robbed, in payments for books, TV, music, movies, you name it. Artists who want to view their work as property are actually selling their souls to immortal corporations which will actually own the works in perpetuity.
Viewing artistic works as property will ruin the artists themselves. Keep copyright laws as they should be: don't give the major corportate powers the ability to acquire ownership of all the works of man -- for all eternity.
Re:Odd behaviour (Score:1, Troll)
I would think the Bushie constantly harping on Clinton's penis would be the troll, and the one responding would simply be swatting him.
Let go of Clinton's unit. Grab Bush's.
"Score:0,Redundant"??
I was one of the first posters, Einsteins, so the others were redundant.
And I guess all those dead men, women, and children were indeed redundant. We've fixed that. Huzzah for us. Now they can die of disentery; more redundancy removed!
You Bushies really can't take anyone saying "no", can you?
"but that artists should get paid for what they do."
Again and again it must be said: Artists are not getting paid for their music -- not the vast, vast majority.
The music corporations are eating all of the money. And the artists cannot, by law, force their publishers to open the books to check the accounting -- a singular exception to normal business law.
The latest in such gall is the news that the music companies are now demanding a part of the concert income -- up to now, the only way a musician can really make any money. Why? Music piracy, of course! They demand to make up income "stolen" from them by pirates by grabbing a percentage of the concert take!
Even BusinessWeek is babbling about the music industry's loss of cash from piracy -- without giving a thought to the ideas that 1) we're in an economic meltdown, and 2) the recording industry cut production in the last two years, so of bloody course they have lower sales!
Artists are the very last people to be paid. Paying for a CD rarely pays an artist -- you're just feeding his jailor. If you want to support an artist, go to a concert.
Downloading MP3's isn't hurting the artists one damned bit. It's hurting the thieves that are robbing them of all their labor. Simply put, downloading doesn't hurt anyone important.
Gore did beat Bush. It's hard to be better than the winner.
Independents = Liberals who won't use the L-word.
Smiley face.
"I repeat... I... did not... have sexual relations with that woman..."
"And it is none of your goddamned fucking business, you hypocritical, amoral, lecherous, power-hungry lying fuckers. Get off my back. Shut the fuck up. I'm trying to kill Osama bin Laden, whom you claim is not a problem. I don't have time for this unbelieveable bullshit."
-- what Clinton should have said.
Not a dumbass. Russert had a change of heart years ago. And he was personally courted by General Electric's hyperconservative CEO Walsh to be NBC's pocket "liberal" on Meet the Press. Russert took every care to assassinate Clinton's presidency, while tippy-toeing around Bush's as though it were wired with grenades. The man sold out years ago.
Additionally, I think people have completely forgotten what "liberal" and "conservative" mean. Russert and Bush are not conservatives: they are neocons, closet corporate radicals. Most Americans hold classic liberal values; they simply have been brainwashed into hating the name.
No, the main thing with Bush is 8-10 thousand dead people, and tens of thousands with their limbs and faces blown off. But I agree with you of course. It's amazing how insane most people's priorities are. Blowjob, supremely important: thousands of murdered people, insignificant.
It's not going to happen again. The reason why three of the the four hijacked planes hit the attackers' targets is this: no one on the planes, not the pilots, not the passengers, not the attendents, had an inkling that the hijackers were intent on crashing the planes. It had never happened before.
Standard procedure for a hijacking is to cooperate with the hijackers to minimize harm to the people on the plane.
If the people on a hijacked plane know that they are on a doomed aircraft, the attackers have no leverage. The Pennsylvania flight was different from the other three in that the passengers ignored the-plane-will-crash-if-we-use-cellphones rule, called their families, got the lowdown, and then attacked the terrorists. The terrorists lost. The mission failed.
Mr. Shoe-Bomb also failed because the passengers gang-beat his ass. Mission failed.
Every plane hijacked in the future will have passengers that will not cooperate. The pilots won't cooperate. Missions to use airliners as bombs are now useless: any sane attacker will of course now use other methods.
Creating softwalls and turning our country into a AA-covered bunker is idiotic. Attacks via planes can't succeed. At the very least, the pilots will slam the plane into a field to save the lives of thousands.
I worry at the irrationality of the actions of the people of the U.S. Shutdown of the Constitution. Illegal attacks against non-threatening countries. Concentration camp in Cuba, complete with execution chamber (coming soon). Cameras everywhere. Reading everyone's mail.
You know, the attackers communicated face-to-face, so NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE STOPPED THEM.
We're turning the U.S. into an prison populated by people constantly agitated by their warden into a state of hysterical paranoia.
Listen, the people who really, really wanted to blow us up died in the planes. They are dead. They aren't in Iraq. They aren't everyone who speaks Arabic. They aren't being tortured in little white jail cells across the U.S.
Any future attack will come from a different front. And frankly, these men aren't that bright: they're cultists to begin with, so 9/10 of their brain cells are useless anyway.
The few loonies who want to attack us will do so no matter how many cameras are over our beds. Now, on the other hand, by attacking non-combatants all over the world, Bush Inc. has converted infinite good will into an implacable wall of resistance, not because of what we are, or the insanity of our enemies, but because of what we have done to people who had nothing to do with the 911 attackers. 2,000-10,000 dead in Iraq: Perle and Wolfowitz refuse to give an accounting. Bush has insulted and alienated the entire world when previously he had them firmly on our side. He's like John Adams wandering into Paris in the 1770's, who insulted and patronized the very people Franklin had so carefully cultivated into supporting the U.S. Adams, like Bush, nearly lost the war by his gross incompentency in diplomacy, his raw moral fanaticism, his ignorance of other nation's cultures, and his blind nationalism.
Soft walls won't save us from Bush's stupidlity in dealing with, well, ANYTHING.
Wait a minute... what's that sound? I hear a faint...
screaming in the distance...
Ah, the entertainment corporations are screaming like they are giving birth to a hairbrush. Anally.
The next sound you hear will be that of legislators passing laws outlawing repiping of TV signals over the Internet. It'll be mixed up with the sounds of broadcasters and cable/satellite companies firing fusilades of cash.
That "pimple" will make all the chip manufacturers comply with DRM, or face criminal charges. Arrogance in the face of the truly fanatical is costly.
Apple and IBM will comply, once the consumers shrug their collective shoulders. Americans are good at shrugging their shoulders. Just look at what happened in the last three months.