There was also the issue of child-support payments being considered after credit card bills. I'm not sure if that made it into the final legislation, but I remember it was a sticking point in Congress.
Yeah, I believe it did. Kids on child support didn't give enough money to campaign warchests, I guess. (pause to retch).
The real question is, how much of the responsibility do the credit-card companies bear for continuing to offer thousands of dollars in credit to people who are already way in debt?
This is where I get annoyed at the "its all personal responsibility" people. If someone asks me for a loan, sure they have a personal responsibility to pay me back, but I have just as much personal responsibility to judge their charecter and abilities before trusting them with my money. BS "reforms" like this take a two way interaction between big moneyed lenders and little guys and put every ounce of responsibility on the little guys.
Credit card companies are making an investment. When they say "lets put a few million dollars in college kids and hope thier parents will bail out their debt when they overrun thier ability to pay" How different is it than me saying "lets put a few thousand in this startup and hope they actually get a product off the ground"? Well, when my investment goes bad, I have to swallow the loss. When mastercard's investments go bad, they swallow your life.
IIRC, they did manage to get a mansion cap on the homestead clause of the new law to slightly limit the way that a millionare in bankrupcy can still be a millionare, while a normal person in bankrupcy is screwed.
Yeah, and the punchline would be delivered to the pranksters in the form of a threatening letter from the real Mastercard lawyers, ordering a cease and desist of all attempts to falsely represent Mastercard litigation policy.
Thats why I'm assuming its real for the moment - I don't think the rec.humor.funny guy is that overwhellingly stupid. I'm not sure where a real legal challenge to the orriginal joke would go (I think keeping the mastercard name in there shows poor judgement on the part of the moderater) But I'm pretty sure where flat out lying about the legal actions of a large corporation would go, especially if a bunch of cranky/.ers really do flood MC with complaints.
And I don't think most judges consider "April Fools!" to be a compelling legal argument in libel cases....
I'm glad I'm not the only one on this crazy group that sees any rights for people past the first two ammendments to the USC. (Or that thinks freedom can be restricted by someone other than the goverment)
I love the fact that this was labled Your Rights Online. Yeah, your on line rights are doing fine. Your offline rights to provide or recieve reproductive health services just took a trip to the shitter. A bunch of kids' rights to go to school without being harrassed, threatened or hurt because of what their parents do for a living just got trashed. But hey, it's FREE SPEECH so everything's good....
The people who run this page are disgusting terrorist fucks, and they just got the green light to keep going. You'll excuse me if I don't feel any increase in freedom from that. As far as I'm concerned, my world just got a little less free. But you'd have to let go of two preconceptions to see why, and most/.ers are really attached to those.
Now we can once again TALK about something and actually be covered by free speech instead of having to toe the line for the politically correct speech of the day.
Thanks, the post above your's hadn't made me want to vomit enough...
Its nice to know that the concept of not advocating murder and terrorism is now "politically correct". And just of today, even! Next time that someone calls me PC, I'll just ahve to say "Why thank you, no, I don't advocate sick twisted fucks advocating and celebrating the murder of healthcare providers..."
You guys need to seriously get some perspective. I can only hope this BS gets overturned in a higher court.
actually, they got him on conspiracy didn't they? It's all well and good to talk about doing things, tell other people they should do things, but the second you and/or they do one action to further the conspiracy (say I buy some ski masks after we talk about robbing a bank), that's when you're gonna be in trouble
Doesn't work. The web site provided names and addresses of specific doctors, This could reasonably be counted as conspiracy as they did some of the leg work in planning an attack.
Anyway, the orriginal post irks me excessivly. This sort of "responsibility" rhetoric that claims that finding anyone but the "trigger man" guilty is (IMHO) actually counter to imposing real responsibility on people. Its reductionist thinking that holding one person or group responsible negates the responsibility of any other person. No one can rationally claim that a particular movie, video game or website "made" them commit a particular crime. But that doesn't mean that we can't assess the contributory impact of such media on crime. But black and white thinkers who have to send one person to hell and let the rest of the world off pure innocent have a hard time dealing with that.
You'd be loosing a lot of money by putting out a NC17 film, that's why nobody does it anymore.
Unless its a really crappy pointless film to begin with and you go for the NC 17 (or unrated) so that you can talk about how "fearless" and "unflinching" it is and get otherwise sane people to come watch it. Or maybe that was just Kids.
Its also a little dishonest to talk about films "having" to cut parts to make an R rating as though there was some pure perfect vision that was mangled by the rating board. Its pretty well known that studios play little games where they PUT IN extra gratuitous and nasty stuff so that the rating board will "cut" them back to basically what they really wanted in the first place. There are cases where rating boards judge a film (perhaps unfairly) based on something actually important to the point of a film, but I sometimes think peple overestimate the creative importance of one extra bush shot, that gout of bood, or three more "fuck"s. For instance, when I saw "Aliens" on TV, it had been dubbed to the moon and back and probably a few blood spurts cut, but you know what? It didn't hurt the film AT ALL. Still just as good, just as exciting, just as dramatic in bits.
So you lose your market if you want to make a NC17 film? So what? Free speech doesn't mean you automatically get an audience. Lots of great films aren't rated at all and never make it out of the art houses or into Blockbuster. You want absolute freedom of expression, produce it yourself and distribute it for free on the internet. You want to be part of the commercial market, play by the rules.
I mean, really: just what is "intellectual property?" It's not a natural right. Where does our notion of "intellectual property" actually come from?
what do you think a natural right is? I don't believe in natural law, I think its usually just a cop out to relieve people of the burden of supporting their views on right and wrong. Our rights are those we reach consensus for as a society and are willing to enforce (and let others have) as a society. IMHO your right to privacy is certainly no more "natural" than my right to IP.
But if I did believe in natural rights, or had to boil down a few "fundemental" rights, certainly the right to at some level own and control the fruits of one's labor would be on the list. This would include IP. (in fact, ownership of IP is more philosophically defensible than, say, land ownership.) As it turns out, there is a general societal consensus that agrees with me on the very basic ideas of IP and therefore its a right. Nothing more, nothing less.
/. says: Reps don't understand bits and bytes. If you don't send them dead trees, they don't think you vote.
I think they understand perfectly well. It takes significantly more effort to write a paper letter than an e-mail. If you were trying to figure out what issues your constituents really cared about, which would you pay more attention to?
Its pretty common/. usage to say "don't understand" when you mean "don't respect, don't agree with me on or don't have time for."
Aside from the effort that each shows, it says the main problem right there in the article. Emails are coming from all over the country to state based offices. A postal letter comes with a return address and even a postmark that says where it comes from. I'd be very suprized if the first sort that congressional mail went through wasn't to put anything out of their district on the bottom of the stack. Even faxes come with a return number. But email could be from anywhere, even a forgien country, and theres often no way to tell without reading through the letter hoping the person thought to mention thier address. How many times would you have a staffer spend all morning plowing through a thousand emails only to find that only 100 of them were from constituents before you decided they could be doing better things with their time.
Finally, email responses are way too easy to "astroturf"* and while 1000 identical postcards are easy to stack and mostly ignore, 1000 identical emails are in some ways even more annoying. Long story short, if you want congress critters to pay attention to their email, stop people from spamming all 400 or so of them at the drop of a hat and use more restraint in mailing. (and put your name and home town in the subject line, maybe you'll make the cut that way)
*Astroturf is a activist term for fake grassroots. In snail mail this means mailing out a bunch of postcards or letters preadressed to the recipients reps with a message on a particular issue. The recipeint just signs it and mails it in. With email versions, you go to a website and enter your zip plus four and get a form letter with your extra comments automaticly sent to your reps. (on the state issues I've worked on we often also send it to the governor, speaker of the house and senate president.)
The problem is that telling your rep what you think is all well and good, but I worry about too much contact turning the situation into government by polling. When groups that I've worked with ask people to write their reps, we don't want them to just say "I support/don't support this", because when it comes down to it, we don't have the majority position on a lot of issues. we ask people to tell their rep WHY this issue is important, try to give them some insight into the real world cost or benifit of the legislation being discussed, give them more information than a data point on popularity. IMHO, if a thousand people write in and say "X is bad! No X!" and a hundred write in to explain how X will directly effect their lives and address the arguments against it, just counting up the "votes" and suporting the side with the most people is not what I expect from a congressman.
And if you go to a movie and don't like it, I guess you can't criticize it unless you make a better one.
Sadly, there are a lot of people who really think like this. Just go back and look at the discussions about the D&D movie. Personaly, I don't get the additude. Like, I can't sing. At all. Really, aweful, no pitch, I got tossed from 7th grade chorus if you can believe that. But my high school had a kick ass musical department, and I stage crewed for the musicals and went to the concerts, and damn it, I know what good singing sounds like and what bad singing sounds like. And I don't care if I'm watching a multimillion dollar star, if I say "her voice was a little off tonight, I hope she gets a rest" I don't need to be able to "do better" to make that judgement.
I don't doubt that there are stuations where an outsider doesn't have the right to say "they should have done that better/different/my way", but telling people they don't have the right to comment unless they can do better gets old real fast when zealots use it against any criticism of something they like.
Well gee I wonder why free speech was included in the constitution and not aids or red cross?
Wow. I mean, wow! I've seen moronic trolls with no real perspective outside of a slavish devotion to the first 4 or 5 items in the bill of rights before. I've seen/.ers so wrapped up in their right to swap music that they elevate it to the same level as political dissidents in china or the founding fathers. But you really take the cake.
Tell me you were trying for some sort of irony. tell me you're not really this stupid. please.
How much would research have stagnated by now if everything became government IP?
you mean as opposed to the government funding the research then the results becoming corportate IP? Its a pretty good tossup, IMHO on whether removing the corporate or the government imputus to research would have worse effects. But AFAIK, research is nowhere near "stagnating" at universities where the major funding is government grants. And we'd be even better off if the results of those studies didn't end up lining corporate pockets when they put in a minority of the cash.
The corporate sector may build a better mousetrap, but the government destroyed smallpox. Don't let your love of the "free market" blind you to the real tradeoffs. The kind of free speach that medical research needs is in no danger, and the freenet model of unverified data, trust by voting and anyone can vote and "be an informed consumer of information" would be a hell of a lot more destructive to medical research than anything the givernment could impose.
*EVERY* time someone makes a complaint to the cops, and they take action, there's a case number and a file. Doesn't matter *what* the complaint is about, nor does it matter if the complaint was off-base, out-to-lunch or otherwise illegitimate.
Slashdotters live in a rewritable world. If you make a mistake, you don't just correct it, you erase its existance. You are responsible only for the end product and justifying your billable hours. Thay don't understand the world of police, doctors, even teachers, who live in a "note in the margins" world, where false starts, investigations that go nowhere and even mistakes MUST be kept on file, every detail from the begining to end. Its a world where the proccess is every bit as important as the end product.
Imagine for a minute that they didn't keep a file. Stop the hysteria of calling it a "police record" for the kids, and think of what it would mean if there was no official record of any action that didn't end in an arrest. It would meant that at the end of the year, the police would look back and see that there were NO investigations, complaints or policies that led to unneccassary detentions or questionings (assuming one would actually rank this case as unneccassary, which I am not for the moment). Would this incredulous (and other traits) father have been happier if the police had told him "no, we're keeping no record of any contact with you son, so officially we never talked to him, so if you go to the press, we'll just have the department spokesman say 'we have no records' and it'll be the truth"?
Why does he think they gave him the record number? To mock him with his kid's "police record"? Come on, think here! If the father wants to make a stink to someone more significant than/. he has the right to look up those records, by the number and see exactly what the police say happened and what the official take on the situation is.
No wonder so few people here understood the danger of nano/electronic/magic paper. They think police keeping a paper trail of their investigations as a BAD THING! Sheesh, indeed.
What it takes to get moderated down arround here. Odd thing, I was at max karma and after 2 funny, 2 troll and a flamebait (which was apparently wrong sicne it hasn't gardnered any flames) I'm down by three instead of the total of 1. I assmune the funny's went on first raising the profile to attract the trolls, but since they were first they didn't raise my karma (already at max) to counteract the down points. I wonder if this is a good thing a bad thing or just a thing.
Bout time my karma went down, I've been trying for metamoderation flames, but that hasn't helped any.
The administrators saw a vague mention of loading shotguns into bags, and responded with alarm. This is not suprising given recent events, and the administration was entirely justified in doing this.
hey, this is SLASHDOT!! Don't you know that absolute unopposed, unquestion and unexamined freedom of any sort of speach is more important than any other possible factor? I mean, who cares if in the vast majority of school shootings the perps had told about their plans explicitly or "creativly" but no one caught it in time? Don't you see the fundemental insanity of (dear god in heaven) QUESTIONING people who already have a web site indicating unhappyness with their school environment and now are making random first person comments about hiding shotguns on another site? I mean they QUESTIONED them! SEPERATELY even! I'm having heart palipitations, they made sure they got the same story from both people, pushed the story to make sure they stuck with it, then checked with another computer person to see that the story made sense! The HUMANITY!!!!!!!
And the police! I can't even go on! They made a record of what had happened, why they were called in and the outcome, and.... oh I passed out for a moment, give me strength.... THEY'RE KEEPING A OFFICIAL RECORD OF THE INCIDENT!!!!!! The bastards KEEP RECORDS!
OK, I think I've had enough evidence for the morning of the average/.ers complete lack of perspective, and I'd like to thank those few voices crying in the wilderness for a realistic view. On one final note, what was up with the attempt to make us thing the guy with a "fuckmyschool" page was some sweet little butter wouldn't melt in my mouth type. Give me a break! If you thought showing that the guy was a hypocrit would make me support him, it didn't work. He throws obscene insults for the world to see then "spells it out" to one person on the phone? What a gutless little shit.
Whoa there Kahuna! You're way out of line. First off, by indicated by the:) emoticon, that comment was made tongue-in-cheek. Second of all, one of my main points was to point out to the previous poster, was that the Christian, Muslim, et al. religions he cited all have actual blood on their hands, Scientology (AFAIK) does not. So, let's keep this thing in perspective as far as religious fervor goes, OK?
I have things firmly in perspective. If I had said "scientoligists are forming a new inquisition and drinking the blodd of their foe's babies!" that would be out of perspective. Stating "they are a controlling abusive cult" is not. The question of the blood on their hands is still very much in debate, and you still seem to be laboring under the assumption that having worse examples out there makes a groups behavior ok. If this is perspective, I am glad to lack it.
Secondly, he was sued (not "beat up", "his house burned down", "abused", "threatened", "terrorized", or even "otherwise punished") which, no, I don't believe is "punishment". It's the way our "modern western culture" resolves differences of opinions. Relax, get off the Jolt! cola, and read the fscking comments next time before you spout off.
Hmmm.... my opinions are "spouting off on Jolt cola" (which I havn't drank since high school, does that crap still exist?) but you are an expert on moern western culture. How odd. have you talked to your shrink about this hypersensitivity where you assign extream emotions to anyone countering your opionon? It seems common on the net and usenet. maybe there's a paper in this.
Anyway, if you are unaware of the use of lawsuits as harrasement, and actually think that their use by the sci cult is meant to "resolve differences of opinion" rather than bankrupt their critics, if you simply ignore the many stories of threats, blackmail and psychological abuse, well, what can I say. Live in your world, it sounds real nice there.
"you're way out of line"? *snort* ooohhh, I'll just go home now...
Ah well, flame off and have a nice day. And don't count on emoticons to get you out of rediculous ideas.
Hastings says that because a 1968 British court decision effectively recognized the basketball court-sized island as a sovereign nation called Sealand, HavenCo can provide more privacy and legal protections then anyone else on the planet.
So hastings is a liar. (or uses a very liberal meaning of "effectivly".) From what I've read, ALL the court said was that they were not under UK juristdiction at that time. While the Sealand tykes may want to pretend that thats the same thing as granting them sovereign nation status, there's no logical reason for anyone else to draw that conclusion. They probably would have said the same thing if he was living in a house boat out there. Lots of people are outside the juristdiction of lots of countries! It doesn't make them nations!
If Sealand does anything to truely piss off the UK, they will go and arrest the guy again, and they will take him to court again to revisit the issue of jurisdiction, and the UK court will take into account any changes in international law and territorial waters in the meantime in deciding if the UK now has jurisdiction over this individual. And if this guy starts ranting about the soverign nation of sealand and diplomatic imunity as the leader of a forgien nation, the barristers will just roll their eyes and quietly talk arround him, just like with the montana militia, just like with the "independant nation of texas" and just like with every other group of posers.
It all well and good to talk up this sort of "independant nation" story for fun and profit, but if they are dumb enough to believe their own propaganda, they are in for a rude awakening some day.
Kahuna Burger
Re:Total waste volume
on
Paper Phones
·
· Score: 2
I expect that it will be less damaging in the long run, whether the woman who came up with the idea pushes for it or not. (And she just might, simply because of pressure from people sharing your view of the paper phone as an ecological disaster waiting to happen.)
I prefer to think that some rudimentary intelligence will kick in on her part. If the cost of producing the phone is more than the cost of a prepaid address label, she should be making it easy for people to send them back for refurbishing when they're used up. If she's working with companies using these for promotional items, returning it can be good for a free something or other (and the company providing the something or other gets an address.) There's good economic reason to re-use things, with the added bonus of not being part of the problem.
And in terms of the long term good/bad of these, I don't think thats really relevant to the fact that the woman's additude sucks. She didn't respond to the criticisms by finding out what the costs were and weren't, she just said "who cares?". That additude, as much as the reality of long term damage possiblities is what turned me off to her - that she doesn't even care enough to look for a good answer to the question.
Of course in older times (and, with some religions even now), if people disagreed...they just killed them. (see Spanish Inquisition, jihad, etc.)
I think I'll take the Scientology "punishment". =)
You put punishment in quotes after talking about death. Anything short of death isn't a punishment? Is any modern behavior OK just because you can point to someone in history that did something worse? If a racist group goes around beating up black people, or burning down their homes, do we say "In the past (and someplaces even today) if they don't like the color of your skin they kill you. I'll take the neo nazi 'abuse':)"
In modern western cultures, it is not acceptable to harrass, abuse, threaten, terrorize or otherwise punish someone for changing religions. Trying to underplay abuse because somewhere, sometimes it could have been worse would allow almost any level of horrific behavior. Its not a rational excuse.
occult rituals, social tension or small and non standard? Actually none of those is what I was taught was a cult. Cult watch groups have a few simple warning signs, and while some of the more xtian ones will worry about "non xtian doctrines" the vast majority are all about social control. Cults want to know where you are. Cults don't want you to be "alone" (= without a more expereinced member) during your early introduction to the group. Cults strongly discourage or forbid interactions with those outside the group and often assign them to a lower state socially/emotionally/spirtually. Cults want you to be financially and socially dependent on them. Cults make it hard for you to leave.
There are small "non standard" or occultist groups that are not cults. There can be large traditional churches that are cults. There can be non religious groups that still fit the definition of cults as control groups. (OT For the record I think that the first group of disciples around jesus constituted a cult by many of the (real, not your) sociological describers of cults.)
I understand why someone in a cult group would want to play sophist games to make the word "cult" meaningless because it lets them duck the real issues of their behavior. But why is it so popular with other people? Is it just a fun game where you think you've won an argument by refusing any common language to hold the discussion in? Mental masturbation? Identifying with "outsiders" and not wanting to admit that some outsider groups are just not as healthy as others? What?
Oh, please--take twenty minutes and come up with a slightly less pathetic analogy. Spreading someone's ideas around is hardly comparable to violating someone's person by force. Maybe you thought by going to extremes you'd better illustrate your point, but it just makes you sound like a fifth-grader who doesn't understand the issue.
ohh... I feel so bad. "Makes you sound like a fifth grader" is such an insightful and intellectually demolishing comment, it takes my breath away.
Sorry, but you haven't actually addressed my point. The language was inflamatory, sure, but pathetic? Sounds like a dodge to me. Why don't you try dealing with the actual question of "since when does the free market mean that if you don't like the price of something you take it?" Instead of building strawmen about whistling tunes, and claiming that you know what copyright is really about (as opposed to what its been written as) why don't you tell me why making theft easy could ever make it right?
Once in a while, some innocent napsterite will just tell the truth "I want something, and I have a chance to just take it, so I will." They don't pretend that they have any right to, they don't care if its right or wrong, they want, they don't have any consequences, so they take. It takes a/.er to dress that up in some sort of law of the jungle/information wants to be free/not real property bullshit and try to convince themselves that this is really the way it SHOULD BE.
Ah, whatever, my food's here and I waste to much time on/. I should take a break until I can put you all in the proper perspective.
Don't confuse this with somthing in the Bill Of Rights. Copyright is not a natural or human right. We are used to it here in the USA, but it doesn't have to be this way.
because they thought of it before the last minute compromise of the bill of rights? Because you say so?
Nothing "has to" be thought of as a natural human right. (frankly I don't do natural law to begin with so trying to use that as a distinction is meaningless to me). The bill of rights is certainly neither the begining or the end. But the main point is that the first US mention of legal copyright and all of its implications are quite distinctly about the rights of creators to control their work, and the previous comments to the contrary were lies.
Personally I think that the right to the fruits of ones labor is pretty high up on the list of basic rights. You can disagree in your personal ethical view, but nobody died and gave you the power to arbitrary state what is a "real" right and what isn't.
The only real choice a woman has about her sexual autonomy is whether to go out of the house or stay holed up with a gun in her hand. Once she puts her body out there, any rights are an illusion supplied by the courts. They may allow her some control, but once someone realizes they can rape her, the genies out of the bottle and women will just have to get used to it. Lets remove all the rape laws, and if some women still venture out of their homes, we'll know we never really needed them anyway.
You don't have a right to anyone else's creative work, unless you go through the process they have decided on, be that payment, reading in in conjection with ads, or them just giving it to you. The fact that it is getting easier for you to violate other people's rights does not and never will make it right. It just makes it easier to be wrong.
Maybe the oppertunities of distribution will lead to some artists to give their work away for the joy or the recognition or whatever. But that doesn't remove the rights of those who choose to not go that route, or make you any less a theif if you decide to ignor their rights and take what you want.
Copyright is a monopoly on the copying of a work, specifically designed to encourage production and publication of works. NOT a protection of the rights of the author.
you are full of it. If that were true, all work would be work for hire and those with the means of publishing would be the owners of work that they published. The opposite is true. Copyright belongs to the creator of a work unless there is a specific work for hire, and the "tradition of copyright" which you are apparently cluesless on is that copyright always returns to the author after a limited print run unless there is a specific contract stating otherwise.
Copyright is exactly about the creator having control over his or her work, and that position is enshrined in law and tradition, and for that matter, the bloody US constitution.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Note the words "exclusive right" and "authors" and the total lack of mention of publishing monopolies or any other such crap.
Now stop lying about authors' rights and go back to violating them, I'm sure you're better at it.
if napster can stop it on their servers, but the technology exists (and is in use) for it to happen in a way that nobody has the ability to stop infringement...well its sort of like screwing napster for something people are doing anyway.
huh? So if you are a druggist and are allowing people to illegally obtain controlled drugs through you it should be ok, because there might be another way of them doing it where you couldn't stop them?
If napster can stop it from happening on their servers, they have a legal responsibility to or be held accountable. The existance of other routes to illegality doesn't absolve them of any responsibility. That would be rediculous.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I believe it did. Kids on child support didn't give enough money to campaign warchests, I guess. (pause to retch).
The real question is, how much of the responsibility do the credit-card companies bear for continuing to offer thousands of dollars in credit to people who are already way in debt?
This is where I get annoyed at the "its all personal responsibility" people. If someone asks me for a loan, sure they have a personal responsibility to pay me back, but I have just as much personal responsibility to judge their charecter and abilities before trusting them with my money. BS "reforms" like this take a two way interaction between big moneyed lenders and little guys and put every ounce of responsibility on the little guys.
Credit card companies are making an investment. When they say "lets put a few million dollars in college kids and hope thier parents will bail out their debt when they overrun thier ability to pay" How different is it than me saying "lets put a few thousand in this startup and hope they actually get a product off the ground"? Well, when my investment goes bad, I have to swallow the loss. When mastercard's investments go bad, they swallow your life.
IIRC, they did manage to get a mansion cap on the homestead clause of the new law to slightly limit the way that a millionare in bankrupcy can still be a millionare, while a normal person in bankrupcy is screwed.
Kahuna Burger
Thats why I'm assuming its real for the moment - I don't think the rec.humor.funny guy is that overwhellingly stupid. I'm not sure where a real legal challenge to the orriginal joke would go (I think keeping the mastercard name in there shows poor judgement on the part of the moderater) But I'm pretty sure where flat out lying about the legal actions of a large corporation would go, especially if a bunch of cranky /.ers really do flood MC with complaints.
And I don't think most judges consider "April Fools!" to be a compelling legal argument in libel cases....
Kahuna Burger
I love the fact that this was labled Your Rights Online. Yeah, your on line rights are doing fine. Your offline rights to provide or recieve reproductive health services just took a trip to the shitter. A bunch of kids' rights to go to school without being harrassed, threatened or hurt because of what their parents do for a living just got trashed. But hey, it's FREE SPEECH so everything's good....
The people who run this page are disgusting terrorist fucks, and they just got the green light to keep going. You'll excuse me if I don't feel any increase in freedom from that. As far as I'm concerned, my world just got a little less free. But you'd have to let go of two preconceptions to see why, and most /.ers are really attached to those.
Everything sounds like a police state to slashdotters. Its some sort of congenital defect in the ears.
Kahuna Burger
Thanks, the post above your's hadn't made me want to vomit enough...
Its nice to know that the concept of not advocating murder and terrorism is now "politically correct". And just of today, even! Next time that someone calls me PC, I'll just ahve to say "Why thank you, no, I don't advocate sick twisted fucks advocating and celebrating the murder of healthcare providers..."
You guys need to seriously get some perspective. I can only hope this BS gets overturned in a higher court.
Kahuna Burger
Doesn't work. The web site provided names and addresses of specific doctors, This could reasonably be counted as conspiracy as they did some of the leg work in planning an attack.
Anyway, the orriginal post irks me excessivly. This sort of "responsibility" rhetoric that claims that finding anyone but the "trigger man" guilty is (IMHO) actually counter to imposing real responsibility on people. Its reductionist thinking that holding one person or group responsible negates the responsibility of any other person. No one can rationally claim that a particular movie, video game or website "made" them commit a particular crime. But that doesn't mean that we can't assess the contributory impact of such media on crime. But black and white thinkers who have to send one person to hell and let the rest of the world off pure innocent have a hard time dealing with that.
Kahuna Burger
Unless its a really crappy pointless film to begin with and you go for the NC 17 (or unrated) so that you can talk about how "fearless" and "unflinching" it is and get otherwise sane people to come watch it. Or maybe that was just Kids.
Its also a little dishonest to talk about films "having" to cut parts to make an R rating as though there was some pure perfect vision that was mangled by the rating board. Its pretty well known that studios play little games where they PUT IN extra gratuitous and nasty stuff so that the rating board will "cut" them back to basically what they really wanted in the first place. There are cases where rating boards judge a film (perhaps unfairly) based on something actually important to the point of a film, but I sometimes think peple overestimate the creative importance of one extra bush shot, that gout of bood, or three more "fuck"s. For instance, when I saw "Aliens" on TV, it had been dubbed to the moon and back and probably a few blood spurts cut, but you know what? It didn't hurt the film AT ALL. Still just as good, just as exciting, just as dramatic in bits.
So you lose your market if you want to make a NC17 film? So what? Free speech doesn't mean you automatically get an audience. Lots of great films aren't rated at all and never make it out of the art houses or into Blockbuster. You want absolute freedom of expression, produce it yourself and distribute it for free on the internet. You want to be part of the commercial market, play by the rules.
Pheh.
Kahuna Burger
what do you think a natural right is? I don't believe in natural law, I think its usually just a cop out to relieve people of the burden of supporting their views on right and wrong. Our rights are those we reach consensus for as a society and are willing to enforce (and let others have) as a society. IMHO your right to privacy is certainly no more "natural" than my right to IP.
But if I did believe in natural rights, or had to boil down a few "fundemental" rights, certainly the right to at some level own and control the fruits of one's labor would be on the list. This would include IP. (in fact, ownership of IP is more philosophically defensible than, say, land ownership.) As it turns out, there is a general societal consensus that agrees with me on the very basic ideas of IP and therefore its a right. Nothing more, nothing less.
Kahuna Burger
I think they understand perfectly well. It takes significantly more effort to write a paper letter than an e-mail. If you were trying to figure out what issues your constituents really cared about, which would you pay more attention to?
Its pretty common /. usage to say "don't understand" when you mean "don't respect, don't agree with me on or don't have time for."
Aside from the effort that each shows, it says the main problem right there in the article. Emails are coming from all over the country to state based offices. A postal letter comes with a return address and even a postmark that says where it comes from. I'd be very suprized if the first sort that congressional mail went through wasn't to put anything out of their district on the bottom of the stack. Even faxes come with a return number. But email could be from anywhere, even a forgien country, and theres often no way to tell without reading through the letter hoping the person thought to mention thier address. How many times would you have a staffer spend all morning plowing through a thousand emails only to find that only 100 of them were from constituents before you decided they could be doing better things with their time.
Finally, email responses are way too easy to "astroturf"* and while 1000 identical postcards are easy to stack and mostly ignore, 1000 identical emails are in some ways even more annoying. Long story short, if you want congress critters to pay attention to their email, stop people from spamming all 400 or so of them at the drop of a hat and use more restraint in mailing. (and put your name and home town in the subject line, maybe you'll make the cut that way)
*Astroturf is a activist term for fake grassroots. In snail mail this means mailing out a bunch of postcards or letters preadressed to the recipients reps with a message on a particular issue. The recipeint just signs it and mails it in. With email versions, you go to a website and enter your zip plus four and get a form letter with your extra comments automaticly sent to your reps. (on the state issues I've worked on we often also send it to the governor, speaker of the house and senate president.)
The problem is that telling your rep what you think is all well and good, but I worry about too much contact turning the situation into government by polling. When groups that I've worked with ask people to write their reps, we don't want them to just say "I support/don't support this", because when it comes down to it, we don't have the majority position on a lot of issues. we ask people to tell their rep WHY this issue is important, try to give them some insight into the real world cost or benifit of the legislation being discussed, give them more information than a data point on popularity. IMHO, if a thousand people write in and say "X is bad! No X!" and a hundred write in to explain how X will directly effect their lives and address the arguments against it, just counting up the "votes" and suporting the side with the most people is not what I expect from a congressman.
Kahuna Burger
Sadly, there are a lot of people who really think like this. Just go back and look at the discussions about the D&D movie. Personaly, I don't get the additude. Like, I can't sing. At all. Really, aweful, no pitch, I got tossed from 7th grade chorus if you can believe that. But my high school had a kick ass musical department, and I stage crewed for the musicals and went to the concerts, and damn it, I know what good singing sounds like and what bad singing sounds like. And I don't care if I'm watching a multimillion dollar star, if I say "her voice was a little off tonight, I hope she gets a rest" I don't need to be able to "do better" to make that judgement.
I don't doubt that there are stuations where an outsider doesn't have the right to say "they should have done that better/different/my way", but telling people they don't have the right to comment unless they can do better gets old real fast when zealots use it against any criticism of something they like.
Kahuna Burger
Wow. I mean, wow! I've seen moronic trolls with no real perspective outside of a slavish devotion to the first 4 or 5 items in the bill of rights before. I've seen /.ers so wrapped up in their right to swap music that they elevate it to the same level as political dissidents in china or the founding fathers. But you really take the cake.
Tell me you were trying for some sort of irony. tell me you're not really this stupid. please.
Kahuna Burger
you mean as opposed to the government funding the research then the results becoming corportate IP? Its a pretty good tossup, IMHO on whether removing the corporate or the government imputus to research would have worse effects. But AFAIK, research is nowhere near "stagnating" at universities where the major funding is government grants. And we'd be even better off if the results of those studies didn't end up lining corporate pockets when they put in a minority of the cash.
The corporate sector may build a better mousetrap, but the government destroyed smallpox. Don't let your love of the "free market" blind you to the real tradeoffs. The kind of free speach that medical research needs is in no danger, and the freenet model of unverified data, trust by voting and anyone can vote and "be an informed consumer of information" would be a hell of a lot more destructive to medical research than anything the givernment could impose.
Perspective, guys, persective.
Kahuna Burger
Slashdotters live in a rewritable world. If you make a mistake, you don't just correct it, you erase its existance. You are responsible only for the end product and justifying your billable hours. Thay don't understand the world of police, doctors, even teachers, who live in a "note in the margins" world, where false starts, investigations that go nowhere and even mistakes MUST be kept on file, every detail from the begining to end. Its a world where the proccess is every bit as important as the end product.
Imagine for a minute that they didn't keep a file. Stop the hysteria of calling it a "police record" for the kids, and think of what it would mean if there was no official record of any action that didn't end in an arrest. It would meant that at the end of the year, the police would look back and see that there were NO investigations, complaints or policies that led to unneccassary detentions or questionings (assuming one would actually rank this case as unneccassary, which I am not for the moment). Would this incredulous (and other traits) father have been happier if the police had told him "no, we're keeping no record of any contact with you son, so officially we never talked to him, so if you go to the press, we'll just have the department spokesman say 'we have no records' and it'll be the truth"?
Why does he think they gave him the record number? To mock him with his kid's "police record"? Come on, think here! If the father wants to make a stink to someone more significant than /. he has the right to look up those records, by the number and see exactly what the police say happened and what the official take on the situation is.
No wonder so few people here understood the danger of nano/electronic/magic paper. They think police keeping a paper trail of their investigations as a BAD THING! Sheesh, indeed.
Kahuna Burger
Bout time my karma went down, I've been trying for metamoderation flames, but that hasn't helped any.
hey, this is SLASHDOT!! Don't you know that absolute unopposed, unquestion and unexamined freedom of any sort of speach is more important than any other possible factor? I mean, who cares if in the vast majority of school shootings the perps had told about their plans explicitly or "creativly" but no one caught it in time? Don't you see the fundemental insanity of (dear god in heaven) QUESTIONING people who already have a web site indicating unhappyness with their school environment and now are making random first person comments about hiding shotguns on another site? I mean they QUESTIONED them! SEPERATELY even! I'm having heart palipitations, they made sure they got the same story from both people, pushed the story to make sure they stuck with it, then checked with another computer person to see that the story made sense! The HUMANITY!!!!!!!
And the police! I can't even go on! They made a record of what had happened, why they were called in and the outcome, and.... oh I passed out for a moment, give me strength.... THEY'RE KEEPING A OFFICIAL RECORD OF THE INCIDENT!!!!!! The bastards KEEP RECORDS!
OK, I think I've had enough evidence for the morning of the average /.ers complete lack of perspective, and I'd like to thank those few voices crying in the wilderness for a realistic view. On one final note, what was up with the attempt to make us thing the guy with a "fuckmyschool" page was some sweet little butter wouldn't melt in my mouth type. Give me a break! If you thought showing that the guy was a hypocrit would make me support him, it didn't work. He throws obscene insults for the world to see then "spells it out" to one person on the phone? What a gutless little shit.
Kahuna Burger
I have things firmly in perspective. If I had said "scientoligists are forming a new inquisition and drinking the blodd of their foe's babies!" that would be out of perspective. Stating "they are a controlling abusive cult" is not. The question of the blood on their hands is still very much in debate, and you still seem to be laboring under the assumption that having worse examples out there makes a groups behavior ok. If this is perspective, I am glad to lack it.
Secondly, he was sued (not "beat up", "his house burned down", "abused", "threatened", "terrorized", or even "otherwise punished") which, no, I don't believe is "punishment". It's the way our "modern western culture" resolves differences of opinions. Relax, get off the Jolt! cola, and read the fscking comments next time before you spout off.
Hmmm.... my opinions are "spouting off on Jolt cola" (which I havn't drank since high school, does that crap still exist?) but you are an expert on moern western culture. How odd. have you talked to your shrink about this hypersensitivity where you assign extream emotions to anyone countering your opionon? It seems common on the net and usenet. maybe there's a paper in this.
Anyway, if you are unaware of the use of lawsuits as harrasement, and actually think that their use by the sci cult is meant to "resolve differences of opinion" rather than bankrupt their critics, if you simply ignore the many stories of threats, blackmail and psychological abuse, well, what can I say. Live in your world, it sounds real nice there.
"you're way out of line"? *snort* ooohhh, I'll just go home now...
Ah well, flame off and have a nice day. And don't count on emoticons to get you out of rediculous ideas.
Kahuna Burger
So hastings is a liar. (or uses a very liberal meaning of "effectivly".) From what I've read, ALL the court said was that they were not under UK juristdiction at that time. While the Sealand tykes may want to pretend that thats the same thing as granting them sovereign nation status, there's no logical reason for anyone else to draw that conclusion. They probably would have said the same thing if he was living in a house boat out there. Lots of people are outside the juristdiction of lots of countries! It doesn't make them nations!
If Sealand does anything to truely piss off the UK, they will go and arrest the guy again, and they will take him to court again to revisit the issue of jurisdiction, and the UK court will take into account any changes in international law and territorial waters in the meantime in deciding if the UK now has jurisdiction over this individual. And if this guy starts ranting about the soverign nation of sealand and diplomatic imunity as the leader of a forgien nation, the barristers will just roll their eyes and quietly talk arround him, just like with the montana militia, just like with the "independant nation of texas" and just like with every other group of posers.
It all well and good to talk up this sort of "independant nation" story for fun and profit, but if they are dumb enough to believe their own propaganda, they are in for a rude awakening some day.
Kahuna Burger
I prefer to think that some rudimentary intelligence will kick in on her part. If the cost of producing the phone is more than the cost of a prepaid address label, she should be making it easy for people to send them back for refurbishing when they're used up. If she's working with companies using these for promotional items, returning it can be good for a free something or other (and the company providing the something or other gets an address.) There's good economic reason to re-use things, with the added bonus of not being part of the problem.
And in terms of the long term good/bad of these, I don't think thats really relevant to the fact that the woman's additude sucks. She didn't respond to the criticisms by finding out what the costs were and weren't, she just said "who cares?". That additude, as much as the reality of long term damage possiblities is what turned me off to her - that she doesn't even care enough to look for a good answer to the question.
Kahuna Burger
I think I'll take the Scientology "punishment". =)
You put punishment in quotes after talking about death. Anything short of death isn't a punishment? Is any modern behavior OK just because you can point to someone in history that did something worse? If a racist group goes around beating up black people, or burning down their homes, do we say "In the past (and someplaces even today) if they don't like the color of your skin they kill you. I'll take the neo nazi 'abuse' :)"
In modern western cultures, it is not acceptable to harrass, abuse, threaten, terrorize or otherwise punish someone for changing religions. Trying to underplay abuse because somewhere, sometimes it could have been worse would allow almost any level of horrific behavior. Its not a rational excuse.
Kahuna Burger
There are small "non standard" or occultist groups that are not cults. There can be large traditional churches that are cults. There can be non religious groups that still fit the definition of cults as control groups. (OT For the record I think that the first group of disciples around jesus constituted a cult by many of the (real, not your) sociological describers of cults.)
I understand why someone in a cult group would want to play sophist games to make the word "cult" meaningless because it lets them duck the real issues of their behavior. But why is it so popular with other people? Is it just a fun game where you think you've won an argument by refusing any common language to hold the discussion in? Mental masturbation? Identifying with "outsiders" and not wanting to admit that some outsider groups are just not as healthy as others? What?
Kahuna Burger
ohh... I feel so bad. "Makes you sound like a fifth grader" is such an insightful and intellectually demolishing comment, it takes my breath away.
Sorry, but you haven't actually addressed my point. The language was inflamatory, sure, but pathetic? Sounds like a dodge to me. Why don't you try dealing with the actual question of "since when does the free market mean that if you don't like the price of something you take it?" Instead of building strawmen about whistling tunes, and claiming that you know what copyright is really about (as opposed to what its been written as) why don't you tell me why making theft easy could ever make it right?
Once in a while, some innocent napsterite will just tell the truth "I want something, and I have a chance to just take it, so I will." They don't pretend that they have any right to, they don't care if its right or wrong, they want, they don't have any consequences, so they take. It takes a /.er to dress that up in some sort of law of the jungle/information wants to be free/not real property bullshit and try to convince themselves that this is really the way it SHOULD BE.
Ah, whatever, my food's here and I waste to much time on /. I should take a break until I can put you all in the proper perspective.
Kahuna Burger
because they thought of it before the last minute compromise of the bill of rights? Because you say so?
Nothing "has to" be thought of as a natural human right. (frankly I don't do natural law to begin with so trying to use that as a distinction is meaningless to me). The bill of rights is certainly neither the begining or the end. But the main point is that the first US mention of legal copyright and all of its implications are quite distinctly about the rights of creators to control their work, and the previous comments to the contrary were lies.
Personally I think that the right to the fruits of ones labor is pretty high up on the list of basic rights. You can disagree in your personal ethical view, but nobody died and gave you the power to arbitrary state what is a "real" right and what isn't.
Kahuna Burger
You don't have a right to anyone else's creative work, unless you go through the process they have decided on, be that payment, reading in in conjection with ads, or them just giving it to you. The fact that it is getting easier for you to violate other people's rights does not and never will make it right. It just makes it easier to be wrong.
Maybe the oppertunities of distribution will lead to some artists to give their work away for the joy or the recognition or whatever. But that doesn't remove the rights of those who choose to not go that route, or make you any less a theif if you decide to ignor their rights and take what you want.
Kahuna Burger
you are full of it. If that were true, all work would be work for hire and those with the means of publishing would be the owners of work that they published. The opposite is true. Copyright belongs to the creator of a work unless there is a specific work for hire, and the "tradition of copyright" which you are apparently cluesless on is that copyright always returns to the author after a limited print run unless there is a specific contract stating otherwise.
Copyright is exactly about the creator having control over his or her work, and that position is enshrined in law and tradition, and for that matter, the bloody US constitution.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Note the words "exclusive right" and "authors" and the total lack of mention of publishing monopolies or any other such crap.
Now stop lying about authors' rights and go back to violating them, I'm sure you're better at it.
Kahuna Burger
huh? So if you are a druggist and are allowing people to illegally obtain controlled drugs through you it should be ok, because there might be another way of them doing it where you couldn't stop them?
If napster can stop it from happening on their servers, they have a legal responsibility to or be held accountable. The existance of other routes to illegality doesn't absolve them of any responsibility. That would be rediculous.
Kahuna Burger