You hilited the correct phrase - 'they may not want to know'. If they don't want to know, they don't care. In other words, they don't think that Mitt Romney's finances have anything to do with his ability to be a good president. And if they don't think that his finances have anything to do with his fitness for the presidency, how is releasing his tax returns going to make them suddenly care? It isn't.
And that was my point about passing a test. It seems like both you and tbannist would prefer if someone had to correctly answer the question "Are a candidate's finances an important consideration when voting for president?" If they don't correctly answer that question then they have demonstrated 'willful ignorance' and are unfit to participate in democracy.
I never said that this case and Watergate are the same. What I said was that IF the Watergate breakin had been treated like people want this case treated, there would not have been a Watergate scandal. The Watergate case would have just been written off as a simple office breakin. Everything that followed the breakin was a result of INVESTIGATING the breakin. In this case we have people saying that they should not investigate the case, and others, like you, saying that it is completely different from Watergate because the president has not been implicated. Well how are we ever going to know if the president is implicated if there is no investigation?
Note that I am in no way saying the president, DNC, or anyone else in particular has anything to do with this case. All I am saying is that politically motivated crimes, where the intent is to influence an election, do deserve a higher priority than random crimes.
Was there a point in there? So people were furious - the investigations occurred nevertheless. And Ford paid the price for the pardon by being voted out of office.
The reason the scammers probably don't have any real tax return information is that none seems to have been leaked. Proving you have information can be done in many ways, such as releasing the exact amount of a certain deduction, or the SHA-1 hash of a whole electronic document. Proving they have the real thing is so easy, we can assume it's a scam if they didn't. Now, having Romney lie and deny it's genuine would quickly end his chances of winning the election. Reporters would come out of the woodwork to verify random facts from the returns. I could probably verify a few from home using Google. They lie would be almost instantly exposed.
This is some extremely faulty logic, but is unfortunately typical.
You CAN NOT use publically available information to prove that private parts of a document are real. If reporters (or you) can verify that information is 'real' from public sources, then a forger can use those same public sources to make the forgery in the first place. You have proved nothing at all.
I hate to think what you think an SHA-1 hash proves. These were (supposedly) paper documents, not electronic. Even if they were electronic what would it prove?
No, and I never said any such thing. You did not lose your right to privacy by applying for a job. You voluntarily gave up some of privacy in exchange for a job. If you did not give up that private information (and a criminal background is public record, not private information), you may not be hired, but that did not mean that the company is now free to collect your urine or blood for a hair sample involuntarily.
The question is not whether or not Romney should disclose his finances. That is up to the voters to decide - if they think the financial information is important and not provided they are perfectly free to not vote for him. The question is whether or not it is OK to violate a persons privacy just because they did not provide some information you want. It is not OK.
What, exactly, is the problem? That not everyone thinks like you?
If people don't care to know about his finances, what good is disclosing them going to do? Perhaps you think that there should be some kind of test before you vote, and everyone that doesn't give the 'correct' (ie your) answers is barred from voting.
How do you know they're different? You may not know this, but the police did not actually catch 'the president and republican party' in the Democrats HQ. They caught five men, 'third parties' as it were. The fact that the president and republican party were involved was not known until after the arrests were made and the police dug deeper into who was behind it.
All that is known so far in this case is that someone is attempting to blackmail Romney by threatening to release stolen tax returns. Neither you, nor anyone else (except the perpetrator(s)) know who that someone is, what their motive is, or any connection they may have to the president or DNC. Just like Watergate. And yet here you are, proclaiming it totally different.
There is a huge difference between demands for financial disclosure and forced disclosure.
There is a simple solution to this. If the American people 'demand' that he disclose his finances, and he doesn't, don't vote for him! What could be simpler.
There is no law 'requiring cabinet nominees to submit a shed load of documentation'. There certainly is no law that says you lose your right to privacy by virtue of being a cabinet nominee. Now, you may not get confirmed by the senate (ie voted in) if you don't voluntarily give up some of your privacy, but that is far, far different than saying you lose your right of privacy.
Now, if the American people decide not to vote for Romney because he did not disclose his tax returns, that is up to them. But saying that he forfeits his right to privacy (and laws protecting such privacy) simply because he is running for office is ludicrous.
I didn't think anybody was dumb enough to think that we have the resources to "track down and arrest" someone for every crime that is reported. So I assumed (incorrectly) that your point was every instance of a crime should be treated the same as all other incidents of that crime. Since we can't possibly prosecute them all, we should either prosecute none, or just randomly pick some to prosecute. It is unlikely that Watergate would have been prosecuted to the extent it was in those circumstances.
Like it or not, prosecution of crime (like everything else we do) is going to have priorities assigned. We do not have infinite resources. And like it or not, any crime which is done for the purposes of influencing an election is going to get a high priority, whether you think the crime would actually influence the election or not.
Wait, you don't think a crime done for the purpose of influencing the outcome of the election for the POTUS is more serious than one that is done just to annoy someone or for financial gain? By that logic the entire Watergate scandal should never have been prosecuted - after all, it was just a simple office burglary.
The flaw in your logic is thinking that sales tax is a tax on goods. It is not. It is a tax on transactions. You don't owe tax because you bought a book, you owe tax because you spent $15.
Well, congratulations on writing one of the stupidest, most ill-informed posts ever. I really hope you are just trolling and could not possibly be that ignorant.
Quite an interesting debate style you have there. What do you call it, "just ignore what was said"?
I already explained how you had the exact same options, you just chose not to use them. You completely ignore that and try to make it into some kind of "us vs them" thing. You ignore the fact that whoever you sold your rights to can continue making money from your work. You ignore the fact that even if whoever you sold your rights to was unable to make any money off your work, you still got paid.
And again, you completely ignore the downside - the thousands and thousands of writers, composers, etc whose work goes unsold and get paid nothing for their work. Where is your outrage that those people are not being paid for their labor? Surely some hack writing some novel that nobody wants to read deserves to make exactly the same money as Tolkien, right? After all, they are performing the same labor, which is all that is important according to your idiotic theory.
And what is with your attachment to work/labor? Nobody gets paid for work or labor. You can move a pile of rocks back and forth all day (a lot of work), but if nobody wanted those rocks moved you don't get paid. Everybody gets paid not for the labor they do, but for the value that labor produces. Some people, such as yourself, are willing to accept a fixed, possibly low, value in exchange for getting paid now. Other people (such as writers) DO NOT HAVE THAT OPTION, and only get paid when their work is sold, which may be MANY years after they did the work.
According to your idiotic logic, if when Tolkien wrote LOTR someone realized what that work was worth, and paid him $10M for it, that would be OK. But if it takes him 80 years to make the same $10M for doing the EXACT SAME WORK, that is somehow "getting paid for sitting on his ass"?
Who ever said anything about having to come up with your own genre? Anybody can write a mystery, war story, adventure story, romance, fantasy, or anything in any other genre. Your example is just ridiculous. That thing you linked to and called a genre is not a genre, it is a specific story. Now, if you want to phrase the statement as 'All writers should come up with his their own story', then the answer is an unequivocal true.
Your second statement is equally as ludicrous. No, you don't have to come up with your own setting. There are thousands of stories set in 'New York', or 'England', or 'on a boat', or 'in a school', and none of them are copyright violations. If you mean, 'Each writer is free to use any other author's imaginary settings', then the answer is of course false. Make up your own imaginary place if that is what you want.
Your last statement is the dumbest of all. Even under today's copyright laws, Shakespeare's works would have been out of copyright for over 300 years. If you want to phrase the statement as 'if Shakespeare died in 1890 his estate deserved deserves royalties for the first 10 years of West Side Story', then the answer is true, why not?
I certainly did address your point. You said that your siblings will inherit your money and physical goods, and apparently you consider that normal and OK. Well, what work did they do to earn that money and physical goods? None. The reason you have a certain amount of money and goods to pass on is because you got the paid the full value of your work up front. Tolkien did not get paid up front, he gets paid based on market demand. Why should the fact that he dies mean that his assets suddeny become worthless while yours do not?
Look at it this way. You do some work under contract for someone, and the terms of the contract say you will be paid over the course of twenty years. You die 5 years into the contract. Does the person you did the work for suddenly get a windfall and not have to honor the contract? Or are your heirs getting paid for work they didn't do? Neither, they are getting money that would have been owed to you had you not died, just like copyright holders.
Do shares of stocks continue earning income when they become part of an estate? Yes. If someone who owns an apartment building dies, do his heirs continue collecting rent? Yes. All assets continue earning whatever they earn when they pass into an estate. Why are you trying to carve out some special exception for copyrights?
Of course they have to pay tax, what kind of stupid question is that? It is an asset, you pay tax.
I don't know what you mean by 'continually pay tax'. You don't 'continually pay tax' on assets (except for real estate property tax). You pay tax on income generated from the asset, or from gains made when the asset is sold.
Slashdot Mirror
You hilited the correct phrase - 'they may not want to know'. If they don't want to know, they don't care. In other words, they don't think that Mitt Romney's finances have anything to do with his ability to be a good president. And if they don't think that his finances have anything to do with his fitness for the presidency, how is releasing his tax returns going to make them suddenly care? It isn't.
And that was my point about passing a test. It seems like both you and tbannist would prefer if someone had to correctly answer the question "Are a candidate's finances an important consideration when voting for president?" If they don't correctly answer that question then they have demonstrated 'willful ignorance' and are unfit to participate in democracy.
I never said that this case and Watergate are the same. What I said was that IF the Watergate breakin had been treated like people want this case treated, there would not have been a Watergate scandal. The Watergate case would have just been written off as a simple office breakin. Everything that followed the breakin was a result of INVESTIGATING the breakin. In this case we have people saying that they should not investigate the case, and others, like you, saying that it is completely different from Watergate because the president has not been implicated. Well how are we ever going to know if the president is implicated if there is no investigation?
Note that I am in no way saying the president, DNC, or anyone else in particular has anything to do with this case. All I am saying is that politically motivated crimes, where the intent is to influence an election, do deserve a higher priority than random crimes.
Was there a point in there? So people were furious - the investigations occurred nevertheless. And Ford paid the price for the pardon by being voted out of office.
The reason the scammers probably don't have any real tax return information is that none seems to have been leaked. Proving you have information can be done in many ways, such as releasing the exact amount of a certain deduction, or the SHA-1 hash of a whole electronic document. Proving they have the real thing is so easy, we can assume it's a scam if they didn't. Now, having Romney lie and deny it's genuine would quickly end his chances of winning the election. Reporters would come out of the woodwork to verify random facts from the returns. I could probably verify a few from home using Google. They lie would be almost instantly exposed.
This is some extremely faulty logic, but is unfortunately typical.
You CAN NOT use publically available information to prove that private parts of a document are real. If reporters (or you) can verify that information is 'real' from public sources, then a forger can use those same public sources to make the forgery in the first place. You have proved nothing at all.
I hate to think what you think an SHA-1 hash proves. These were (supposedly) paper documents, not electronic. Even if they were electronic what would it prove?
No, and I never said any such thing. You did not lose your right to privacy by applying for a job. You voluntarily gave up some of privacy in exchange for a job. If you did not give up that private information (and a criminal background is public record, not private information), you may not be hired, but that did not mean that the company is now free to collect your urine or blood for a hair sample involuntarily.
The question is not whether or not Romney should disclose his finances. That is up to the voters to decide - if they think the financial information is important and not provided they are perfectly free to not vote for him. The question is whether or not it is OK to violate a persons privacy just because they did not provide some information you want. It is not OK.
Yeah, blackmail is always done 'in the name of transparency'. Seems to me you are the one with no brain.
What, exactly, is the problem? That not everyone thinks like you?
If people don't care to know about his finances, what good is disclosing them going to do? Perhaps you think that there should be some kind of test before you vote, and everyone that doesn't give the 'correct' (ie your) answers is barred from voting.
Wrong. Motive always matters.
Whether or not he 'should' have released his returns is not the issue.
How do you know they're different? You may not know this, but the police did not actually catch 'the president and republican party' in the Democrats HQ. They caught five men, 'third parties' as it were. The fact that the president and republican party were involved was not known until after the arrests were made and the police dug deeper into who was behind it.
All that is known so far in this case is that someone is attempting to blackmail Romney by threatening to release stolen tax returns. Neither you, nor anyone else (except the perpetrator(s)) know who that someone is, what their motive is, or any connection they may have to the president or DNC. Just like Watergate. And yet here you are, proclaiming it totally different.
There is a huge difference between demands for financial disclosure and forced disclosure.
There is a simple solution to this. If the American people 'demand' that he disclose his finances, and he doesn't, don't vote for him! What could be simpler.
There is no law 'requiring cabinet nominees to submit a shed load of documentation'. There certainly is no law that says you lose your right to privacy by virtue of being a cabinet nominee. Now, you may not get confirmed by the senate (ie voted in) if you don't voluntarily give up some of your privacy, but that is far, far different than saying you lose your right of privacy.
Now, if the American people decide not to vote for Romney because he did not disclose his tax returns, that is up to them. But saying that he forfeits his right to privacy (and laws protecting such privacy) simply because he is running for office is ludicrous.
I didn't think anybody was dumb enough to think that we have the resources to "track down and arrest" someone for every crime that is reported. So I assumed (incorrectly) that your point was every instance of a crime should be treated the same as all other incidents of that crime. Since we can't possibly prosecute them all, we should either prosecute none, or just randomly pick some to prosecute. It is unlikely that Watergate would have been prosecuted to the extent it was in those circumstances.
Like it or not, prosecution of crime (like everything else we do) is going to have priorities assigned. We do not have infinite resources. And like it or not, any crime which is done for the purposes of influencing an election is going to get a high priority, whether you think the crime would actually influence the election or not.
Bullshit. As of this moment (and certainly when the tax returns were made) he is an American citizen, and nothing more, just like you.
Wait, you don't think a crime done for the purpose of influencing the outcome of the election for the POTUS is more serious than one that is done just to annoy someone or for financial gain? By that logic the entire Watergate scandal should never have been prosecuted - after all, it was just a simple office burglary.
Sounds like a great business opportunity - tax clearing house. Probably already exists. Oops, just googled it, and here it is.
The flaw in your logic is thinking that sales tax is a tax on goods. It is not. It is a tax on transactions. You don't owe tax because you bought a book, you owe tax because you spent $15.
Well, congratulations on writing one of the stupidest, most ill-informed posts ever. I really hope you are just trolling and could not possibly be that ignorant.
Lenovo has had it for longer than that. The IdeaPad my daughter got when she graduated in 2008 had it.
The units ARE right. The WAFERs will be 450mm. Today they are 300mm.
Uh, it's wafer, not chip, size.
Yeah, Google holds the patents (and copyrights!) on weather forecasting.
Quite an interesting debate style you have there. What do you call it, "just ignore what was said"?
I already explained how you had the exact same options, you just chose not to use them. You completely ignore that and try to make it into some kind of "us vs them" thing. You ignore the fact that whoever you sold your rights to can continue making money from your work. You ignore the fact that even if whoever you sold your rights to was unable to make any money off your work, you still got paid.
And again, you completely ignore the downside - the thousands and thousands of writers, composers, etc whose work goes unsold and get paid nothing for their work. Where is your outrage that those people are not being paid for their labor? Surely some hack writing some novel that nobody wants to read deserves to make exactly the same money as Tolkien, right? After all, they are performing the same labor, which is all that is important according to your idiotic theory.
And what is with your attachment to work/labor? Nobody gets paid for work or labor. You can move a pile of rocks back and forth all day (a lot of work), but if nobody wanted those rocks moved you don't get paid. Everybody gets paid not for the labor they do, but for the value that labor produces. Some people, such as yourself, are willing to accept a fixed, possibly low, value in exchange for getting paid now. Other people (such as writers) DO NOT HAVE THAT OPTION, and only get paid when their work is sold, which may be MANY years after they did the work.
According to your idiotic logic, if when Tolkien wrote LOTR someone realized what that work was worth, and paid him $10M for it, that would be OK. But if it takes him 80 years to make the same $10M for doing the EXACT SAME WORK, that is somehow "getting paid for sitting on his ass"?
Say what? All of your statements are just stupid.
Who ever said anything about having to come up with your own genre? Anybody can write a mystery, war story, adventure story, romance, fantasy, or anything in any other genre. Your example is just ridiculous. That thing you linked to and called a genre is not a genre, it is a specific story. Now, if you want to phrase the statement as 'All writers should come up with his their own story', then the answer is an unequivocal true.
Your second statement is equally as ludicrous. No, you don't have to come up with your own setting. There are thousands of stories set in 'New York', or 'England', or 'on a boat', or 'in a school', and none of them are copyright violations. If you mean, 'Each writer is free to use any other author's imaginary settings', then the answer is of course false. Make up your own imaginary place if that is what you want.
Your last statement is the dumbest of all. Even under today's copyright laws, Shakespeare's works would have been out of copyright for over 300 years. If you want to phrase the statement as 'if Shakespeare died in 1890 his estate deserved deserves royalties for the first 10 years of West Side Story', then the answer is true, why not?
I certainly did address your point. You said that your siblings will inherit your money and physical goods, and apparently you consider that normal and OK. Well, what work did they do to earn that money and physical goods? None. The reason you have a certain amount of money and goods to pass on is because you got the paid the full value of your work up front. Tolkien did not get paid up front, he gets paid based on market demand. Why should the fact that he dies mean that his assets suddeny become worthless while yours do not?
Look at it this way. You do some work under contract for someone, and the terms of the contract say you will be paid over the course of twenty years. You die 5 years into the contract. Does the person you did the work for suddenly get a windfall and not have to honor the contract? Or are your heirs getting paid for work they didn't do? Neither, they are getting money that would have been owed to you had you not died, just like copyright holders.
Do shares of stocks continue earning income when they become part of an estate? Yes. If someone who owns an apartment building dies, do his heirs continue collecting rent? Yes. All assets continue earning whatever they earn when they pass into an estate. Why are you trying to carve out some special exception for copyrights?
Of course they have to pay tax, what kind of stupid question is that? It is an asset, you pay tax.
I don't know what you mean by 'continually pay tax'. You don't 'continually pay tax' on assets (except for real estate property tax). You pay tax on income generated from the asset, or from gains made when the asset is sold.