That said - people keep talking about Trump as if he is a citizen and this is a reduction in his freedom. Every part of that is wrong.
- It is not a reduction in his freedom, it is not censorship - only the GOVERNMENT can censor and only the GOVERNMENT is restricted from doing so. Private citizens have the right to boycott something, and to ask others to do the same, that's an act of free speech, it's the exact OPPOSITE of intolerance. - He is NOT a citizen, he is a candidate for the presidency and those are not the remarks and opinions of a citizen - they are official statements of policy. To oppose them is not an intrusion on Trump the person at all (even one that free speech is actually created to encourage). To oppose them, for example through calling for boycotts, is political protest against a policy.
Isn't protesting policies you don't agree with literally the single most important use free speech has ?
Trump is no longer a private citizen, and his words are no longer protected speech in the same way. He is a candidate for president and those words were an actual policy proposal. This petition is no different than one on whitehouse.gov, it's a political protest petition against a policy. It's literally the thing free speech was invented to let us do.
>Expressing the desire to do something (ban Mexicans and Muslims, in this example) is not the same as doing it.
Private citizens cannot censor each other - there is no such thing, sure you can refuse to publish/sell something you can even convince others to, but that's not censorship - in fact it's the exact opposite of censorship - it's an act of free speech ! The person remains free to get somebody else to publish/sell it or publish/sell it themselves.
On the other hand, Trump made those statements as part of his run for president. He was NOT speaking as a private citizen but as a candidate for the highest office in government stating the policies he wants government to pursue. That DOES in fact make it a matter of liberty. If he had said this as just a private citizen a year ago and you responded this way - I may have felt it was wrong. Not illegal, not an infringement on liberty in the least - but morally I would have been opposed to this action as I generally believe that it is better to not go this route. It is an act of free speech even then - but one I would not support or join.
But the moment he announced his candidacy for president, and made these claims as official statements of policy - this action became perfectly justified. While asking people or businesses to boycott somebody is an act of free speech, when that somebody is a candidate for public office and the reason is their policies it becomes even more sacrosanct. This is an act of political protest against an unjust policy proposal.
This is literally the REASON we have free speech in the first place !
You're assuming that will happen - there's no actual law that says it has to. The company I work for was founded in the 1970s by a visionary in his field with a view to a certain way of doing business. That way of doing business was a key competitive edge, and a fundamental part of it is that the company must be privately owned, not publicly traded - so that the company's incentives will align with those of customers and not shareholders. He not only wrote that into the company charter, he made it part of the contract for every person who became a share-holder in the private company that in order to acquire shares they must agree to 1) never ever make the company public 2) Never ever give shares to anybody else who did not agree to the same two agreements.
It's like a GPL for "make sure the company is eternally private". Now, in 2015, we remain one of the smaller companies in our industry, the only private one in the industry - and consistently the best performing company in the industry. We may not have nearly as many customers as the others - but our customers are by far the most loyal, because what we offer is worth it. We charge less and deliver more. The founder hasn't been involved in the company for 2 decades and each of his successors not only shared that vision but made damn sure THEIR successor was somebody who shared it as well.
And no, I'm not marketing and I won't reveal the name of the company or even what industry we are in. Suffice to say - that it's perfectly possible for a company to be private for-ever.
Hell, sometimes a company can BECOME private when the founders are not happy with how "going public" ended up - that happened with Virgin. Virgin became publicly traded in the 1990s, within 6 months Branson came to despise the pressures that the board was putting on him and the things they were demanding. Things that would, sure enough, increase profits but he believed would do so to the detriment of customers which would ultimately cost him the brand loyalty that made the company succeed in the first place. So he bought back every share at the original list price, and took the company private again.
Now consider the number of scandals in recent years from serious people-killing problems in cars where the companies knew about it and did not do a recall. Tessla is pushing itself as a market-creator, and a key part of their strategy is to over-engineer in the extreme. They want to prove the viability of electric cars and part of how they go about it is to build the best cars in the world by not sparing expenses or trying to maximize margins. This is exactly why every non-Tessla electric car is so much cheaper: there's no reason an electric car has to cost that much, you can do it much cheaper if you don't over-engineer to build the highest-quality, safest, vehicle in history.
But when that's your strategy - a single person dying because of a bad seat that the company knew about would utterly destroy it. The risk to the company is far higher than the norm. To not do this recall would be crazy. GM and Toyota came out of their recent major scandals relatively unscathed, even a minor scandal would kill Tessla because Tessla is supposed to be the perfect car.
It makes absolute strategic sense for Tessla to do recalls at the slightest hint of a risk - it doesn't for most car companies, and that's a good argument for regulations with serious teeth. If the fall-out from "your car killed hundreds of people due to a flaw you knew about and ignored" is guaranteed to be "you're entire turn-over for the last 5 years" then the incentives for GM or Toyota or Ford to do recalls would be about on par with Tessla's and scandals like that wouldn't happen again.
Actually, when you look at it as a probability problem - the odds of somebody having exactly your DNA is on the order of a hundred trillion to one, considering only about a hundred billion people have ever lived - I must therefore conclude that it is unlikely to impossible for you to exist. Since the same math applies to all people, they must all be products of my fevered imagination and can therefore be safely ignored.
the radical difference between these results and bloodbank studies - which have universally agreed with the results from paternity tests despite having a random sampling. It also does not factor in Kinsey's findings about adultery and child-conception which strongly supports the idea that most children conceived from affairs would be conceived with somebody closely related to the legal husband, that is to say, somebody likely to share his Y-chromosome.
Well that is the problem with using an inconstant refference value. The earth is still bulging meaning even the straight through the core line version of that measure is changing. Very slowly but still.
If it's a letter received in the mail - not served by an officer of the court - then there is no proof you ever received it, no way to prove the infringement was wilfull based on "I sent a letter".
If you are served by an officer of the court, then that implies that they've actually filed suit - in which case you had better respond. The burden of proof is on the accuser, accusing you of willful infringement has no weight in law unless there is proof that you knew about the patent, and "I wrote them a letter" is not proof.
And I've never met a democrat (at least one who was educated enough to know history) who denied that this was true, or did not consider it wrong.
In fact they go a step further than that, they not only acknowledge these facts, they acknowledge the lasting harmful impacts those policies had and try very hard to undo the damage and give the next generation better and more equal opportunities.
By opposing every effort at undoing the effects of past policies like the KKK and Jim Crow, the republicans have neatly stepped into the shoes vacated by the democrats when the latter embraced the civil rights act.
It's interesting that in the very next election the republican nominee was a man who *did* in fact call to restore all those things, the Trump-before-Trump named Barry Goldwater. He lost but four years later his prodigee won with an identical platform - not a single policy was altered, only the wording to take out the flagrant racist slurs and replace them with dog-whistles like "tough on crime", thus was born Nixon's Southern Strategy: it was Goldwater's "Bring back Jim Crow, down with civil rights for n**gers" with the n-word removed. In fact, Goldwater would become a senior and extremely powerful republican politician during the Nixon years and when the time came to tell Nixon "it's over, you had best resign" - he was one of the three top-dog republicans chosen to convey the message to the beleaguered tricky dick.
Indirectly, the goldwater-nixon-ford triangle would culminate in one of the biggest (and most liberalist) democratic landslides in American history with the election of Jimmy Carter. America hadn't had that liberal a candidate elected since FDR (even Kennedy wasn't close). Carter remains actively one of the most productive ex-presidents in America and has personally oversawn projects that eradicated a disease from this planet and is on the verge of eradicating another. Not a bad record for a president republicans truly despise eh ? Must be all that "I trust science and I want it's benefits available to the poorest people on the planet and I'm actually achieving that successfully" stuff.
And that, of course, is where it all falls appart - if you show anybody reality they don't want to believe -they will simply deny that it's reality and call it propaganda instead. Hence you get republicans who STILL believe that "cutting taxes for the rich" will improve the lives of everybody, decrease the deficit and create jobs - despite all the overwhelming proof from nearly 2 centuries of trying this everywhere on earth (including America) that it always and without exception ONLY achieves the exact OPPOSITE of all those aims. Yet their minds haven't changed in all the failures since this was still called "horse and sparrow economics" (a good name for it - since the poor and working class are literally expected to eat shit).
It's the same thing that keeps religious people religious, and racist people racist.
You can see a thousand videos of a woman walking through new york and hear the catcalls and the rape threats and everything else she is constantly subjected to - and you will ignore the evidence of your own eyes and refuse to acknowledge that a lot of men are seriously shit, way more than a normal distribution - which can only be explained by a cultural condition that allows men who act shit to get away with it (and encourages it). Most people conclude that "hey - I should start calling out men who act like shit" - but sexists just call it "SJW propaganda" and pretend this means it doesn't really happen to anybody or say "I don't personally participate so I don't care and these women are terrible people who blame me for things I don't do" - which is a sentence with the curious attribute that not a single part of it is true.
1) If you do nothing to stop sexist behavior you ARE participating in it. 2) If you talk about yourself and what you do, or do not, do personally when this is pointed out to you - then you are dismissing the problem 3) Nobody was accusing all men - or you personally - just ENOUGH men to make ALL woman experience this.
See the difference. You may never have catcalled a woman in your life - but if you've never called somebody else an asshole for doing it, you've helped keep it happening. Women who point this stuff out are not blaming all men, or even MOST men - just the guilty ones, and asking the others to help.
It's easy to dismiss the suffering of others as propaganda, it's been a the core tactic of rightwing nutjobs for thousands of years and you are keeping that tradition very much alive. But dismissal doesn't make it false. Even if you call it whiny, and even if that's true, whinyness does not make something less true either.
Of course they have a right, and of course they shouldn't be arrested... but that does not mean we can't, as a society, encourage people to make choices that actually promote a healthy, harmonious (and thus prosperous) society - indeed, failing to do so would be grossly negligent by anybody who can see that diversity is a fundamental requirement for a successful team/organisation/company/city/country.
Limited or myopic viewpoints have never, in all of history, had anything but bad outcomes. We cannot and should not try to open minds by force -but we sure as fuck should be doing it by every OTHER means.
You can't actually experience things from other people's point of view in reality.
There is an ability called empathy that lets you get get close, but it only works if you have at least some overlapping experience to build on and a sense of relating to the people involved. This can be built (over many years) through conversation and observation, but very few people have either the desire or the willingness to engage in that.
If this is a short-cut to effective empathy - then it will have good and positive outcomes, if it doesn't work - well neither does the current method of choice so it's not like we actually *lost* anything.
And there it is in a nutshell. American exceptionalism. Its been bullshit in every nation that ever thought they were exceptional and it is bullshot now. I may be a foreigner but I have lived on 4 different continents in 12 different countries. If anything I know more than the Average American because my vision and experience is not so myopic. And if there is one thing I learned from living among all those cultures (including yours by the way) its that while they are all beautifull and unique none are exceptional. Every culture has wonderful things the world should emulate and horifying things they should change. Gun culture is one of the latter in your case.
Eeeeppp wrong. And you were doing so well up until then. Contract law is a relatively modern invention - there are plenty of laws that predate it by millennia, and there are entire legal systems that never had contract law or anything that even vaguely resembles it.
Now you may argue that you meant "modern western free-world" law - but you would still be wrong, firstly quite a lot of the laws in the free world are also present in those other legal systems, and many of them entered the precursors to modern law before contract law did (which means they clearly do not depend on it).
Contract law can only apply to things where there is at least the possibility of legal consent by all involved parties. Laws that let companies get away with externalities flat out ignore contract law, ditto for laws that actually try to fine them for it to encourage internalizing costs. A law against murder is not based on contract law since there is no way you could legally consent to being killed (even if you wanted to die - you cannot legally consent to being a murder victim and the killer would still be committing a crime). Statutory rape would fall in exactly the same category: the very existence of a contract has been precluded by a law that precludes one of the parties from making the choice to enter one.
If every law is based on contract law, then every law prohibiting something must be about either ensuring compliance with contracts or ensuring the integrity of freedom of contract (that's all there is) - but in fact many laws actually restrict what contracts can exist, that's really not based on contract law, it's limitations of contract law - and many laws exist regardless of all contracts (all anti-violence laws).
Laws that prohibit selling something even with a willing-buyer are decidedly not based on contract law (i.e. drug bans or prostitution bans) - you may argue they are bad laws (and in many cases including both my examples I would agree) but they don't stop existing because you don't like them.
Contract law is certainly fundamental to western law and a great many laws can be well described as being based on it, but it's certainly not as universal as you believe.
What... like the old pirate-radio stations that broadcast from ships ?
Forget the boat-that-rocked, this is the 21st century... here comes the boat-that-torrented (actually - don't most boats do that on a regular basis already ?... or is that just the worst pun ever ?).
In case you were unclear- all those lawsuits I spoke about never happened, and were never attempted - because they can't be. Those were all perfectly legal software and not even a copyright monster like Microsoft (and this is Balmer's microsoft) thought they could get away with it. All that software exists, is regularly used and downloaded - and is perfectly legal.
> If it acts the same and looks the same? Somehow you all are delusional thinking you are legally allowed to do this.
Yes... like all the times Microsoft sued OpenOffice.org for looking and acting exactly like MS-Office (often an earlier version)... or that time they sued IceWM for looking almost exactly like Windows95 (hell it even had a win95 theme). Or when Broderbund sued kgoldrunner for recreating the classic 80's loderunner game exactly. Or the lawsuit from Nintendo against Supertux for a near identical play clone of Mario.
Actually what you describe is not only perfectly legal - it's done all the time. A clean-room reverse-engineered recreation of a product is not only legal, it's specifically protected as a right by the law.
It's a bit unclear - but assuming you're right, from the article it seems clear the quest data was recreated to match vanilla, a lot of that would have to be done from scratch - but if so, that would actually be valid copyright infringement. The text of the quests are clearly copyrightable, so are characters and some of the names are likely trademarked.
This may well be more about trademark protection than anything else though - if you allow somebody to offer a product substantially similar to yours, with a similar name who isn't you - that can mean losing your trademarks, which are valuable to blizzard. They really wouldn't to allow EA to be able to create EA-WoW "the not similar at all game with no reused content but the same name".
As far as I can tell - there was no copyright violation by the servers. The users agreed to a T.O.S. that prohibits them to connect to the server however. So I suspect the actual legal argument here is something akin to "provided the means to circumvent" ala DMCA - which really shouldn't have ever been illegal.
What I find odd is that the many private classic-wow emulating servers clearly proves a market for them exists. 800k accounts is tiny next to official WoW numbers which still more than an order of magnitude higher but they are a potential customer base and many existing players would likely join them but for loyalty to blizzard. So why not make money ? Blizzard could add a revenue stream by partnering with these guys and it would cost them nothing (not even legal fees). Or have one server running classic which players could opt into for little expense to them and likely improve their subscription retention rates.
Whether or not you approve of what pirate servers do American companies really are excessive in running to lawyers first. This is a missed opportunity to make ready cash from willing customers with no expense.
Wisconsin ? Aren't the gun-lovers there mostly actual deer hunters ?
Sorry, but that's just not a representative sample. Those towns in Texas where people insist they have a right to walk into a grocery store with an AR-15 in their hands and NOT be presumed armed robbers (at least if you're white) - now that's a representative sample of gun nuttery. I'm not a fan of hunting, I tolerate the idea but I don't support or participate in it. But hunters are by and large responsible gun owners. They simply are not valid samples for "gun lovers" however.
"The federal government is invalid" sovereign-citizen militian crazy people however - they probably shouldn't have guns. Almost no country that has gun control have eradicated legal guns (a few did, true, but this is neither the average nor the majority case). Canada despite very strict gun control actually has higher per-capita gun ownership than the U.S.
Gun control would have almost no impact in Wisconson. The kind of people it would affect, well the world is genuinely better off if they have to arm themselves with knives - or better yet - can't get a gun without comitting a crime and giving us a reason to put them in jail.
Guns for self-defense is a notoriously bad idea, it's literally the worst possible way to try and achieve that goal. Guns for good guys against bad guys - doesn't work. There are virtually NO examples where it has ever actually worked - it fundamentally relies on fatally failing to understand what happens to people in those circumstances. Nothing you can imagine comes close to it. In the real world - unless you are already highly trained(i.e. a cop or a veteran) even if you have a gun you will not be able to use it and the majority of times when somebody in such a situation actually managed to at least get a shot off - they ended up missing the shooter and hitting a bystander.
None of the reasons given not to control guns make any sense. There really is no sane reason to want to own a pistol or a revolver. Hell there is, for the most part, no sane reason to let a cop have one. Many countries do not - their cops aren't killed as often as American cops are and don't kill citizens as often either. They also have less crime.
In the end, statistically, the single most likely result of owning a handgun is you commit suicide with it - and the second most likely result is somebody you love gets shot by accident and the third most likely result is shooting somebody you love in a fit of rage. Self defence happens so rarely it's not even in the top 10 most likely things to happen. Nowhere that gun control was instituted did it get followed by increases in crime. It has never happened. It has always been followed by significant drops in the murder rate in fact. Which is supported by the fact that guns are useless for self defence in the first place. Oh, and quite a lot of people who did actually shoot intruders with their guns are now serving time for murder - because you can't do that, you only gain the right to use lethal force (anywhere in the free world in fact) in self defence when you have a genuine threat to your life or the lives of others. Courts have never held that you "there is somebody in my house" is reasonably translated into a genuine threat to your life without proof the person was at least armed and their weapon drawn. A threat to your television is not a threat that justifies killing somebody - and you will end up convicted of murder if you act like it does. Frankly the best way to mitigate that threat is to have home-insurance.
Guns don't make you safer. And only a coward needs something tangible that doesn't work to gain a feeling of safety. Much the same way I see a great deal of cowardice in religion (it's not wonder the two are so correlated). Fear of death coupled with the desperate desire to control the uncontrollable lets people keep deadly and useless things in their homes (actually endangering themselves for a false sense of security) and invent elaborate stories about how you get another life
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And protesting a proposed government policy with which you disagree is apparently "intolerant".
That said - people keep talking about Trump as if he is a citizen and this is a reduction in his freedom.
Every part of that is wrong.
- It is not a reduction in his freedom, it is not censorship - only the GOVERNMENT can censor and only the GOVERNMENT is restricted from doing so. Private citizens have the right to boycott something, and to ask others to do the same, that's an act of free speech, it's the exact OPPOSITE of intolerance.
- He is NOT a citizen, he is a candidate for the presidency and those are not the remarks and opinions of a citizen - they are official statements of policy. To oppose them is not an intrusion on Trump the person at all (even one that free speech is actually created to encourage). To oppose them, for example through calling for boycotts, is political protest against a policy.
Isn't protesting policies you don't agree with literally the single most important use free speech has ?
Trump is no longer a private citizen, and his words are no longer protected speech in the same way. He is a candidate for president and those words were an actual policy proposal.
This petition is no different than one on whitehouse.gov, it's a political protest petition against a policy. It's literally the thing free speech was invented to let us do.
>Expressing the desire to do something (ban Mexicans and Muslims, in this example) is not the same as doing it.
Private citizens cannot censor each other - there is no such thing, sure you can refuse to publish/sell something you can even convince others to, but that's not censorship - in fact it's the exact opposite of censorship - it's an act of free speech ! The person remains free to get somebody else to publish/sell it or publish/sell it themselves.
On the other hand, Trump made those statements as part of his run for president. He was NOT speaking as a private citizen but as a candidate for the highest office in government stating the policies he wants government to pursue. That DOES in fact make it a matter of liberty. If he had said this as just a private citizen a year ago and you responded this way - I may have felt it was wrong. Not illegal, not an infringement on liberty in the least - but morally I would have been opposed to this action as I generally believe that it is better to not go this route. It is an act of free speech even then - but one I would not support or join.
But the moment he announced his candidacy for president, and made these claims as official statements of policy - this action became perfectly justified. While asking people or businesses to boycott somebody is an act of free speech, when that somebody is a candidate for public office and the reason is their policies it becomes even more sacrosanct. This is an act of political protest against an unjust policy proposal.
This is literally the REASON we have free speech in the first place !
There is an entire chapter devoted to them in Science of discworld but I dont have a link handy.
You're assuming that will happen - there's no actual law that says it has to.
The company I work for was founded in the 1970s by a visionary in his field with a view to a certain way of doing business. That way of doing business was a key competitive edge, and a fundamental part of it is that the company must be privately owned, not publicly traded - so that the company's incentives will align with those of customers and not shareholders.
He not only wrote that into the company charter, he made it part of the contract for every person who became a share-holder in the private company that in order to acquire shares they must agree to
1) never ever make the company public
2) Never ever give shares to anybody else who did not agree to the same two agreements.
It's like a GPL for "make sure the company is eternally private". Now, in 2015, we remain one of the smaller companies in our industry, the only private one in the industry - and consistently the best performing company in the industry. We may not have nearly as many customers as the others - but our customers are by far the most loyal, because what we offer is worth it. We charge less and deliver more. The founder hasn't been involved in the company for 2 decades and each of his successors not only shared that vision but made damn sure THEIR successor was somebody who shared it as well.
And no, I'm not marketing and I won't reveal the name of the company or even what industry we are in. Suffice to say - that it's perfectly possible for a company to be private for-ever.
Hell, sometimes a company can BECOME private when the founders are not happy with how "going public" ended up - that happened with Virgin. Virgin became publicly traded in the 1990s, within 6 months Branson came to despise the pressures that the board was putting on him and the things they were demanding. Things that would, sure enough, increase profits but he believed would do so to the detriment of customers which would ultimately cost him the brand loyalty that made the company succeed in the first place.
So he bought back every share at the original list price, and took the company private again.
Now consider the number of scandals in recent years from serious people-killing problems in cars where the companies knew about it and did not do a recall.
Tessla is pushing itself as a market-creator, and a key part of their strategy is to over-engineer in the extreme. They want to prove the viability of electric cars and part of how they go about it is to build the best cars in the world by not sparing expenses or trying to maximize margins. This is exactly why every non-Tessla electric car is so much cheaper: there's no reason an electric car has to cost that much, you can do it much cheaper if you don't over-engineer to build the highest-quality, safest, vehicle in history.
But when that's your strategy - a single person dying because of a bad seat that the company knew about would utterly destroy it. The risk to the company is far higher than the norm. To not do this recall would be crazy. GM and Toyota came out of their recent major scandals relatively unscathed, even a minor scandal would kill Tessla because Tessla is supposed to be the perfect car.
It makes absolute strategic sense for Tessla to do recalls at the slightest hint of a risk - it doesn't for most car companies, and that's a good argument for regulations with serious teeth. If the fall-out from "your car killed hundreds of people due to a flaw you knew about and ignored" is guaranteed to be "you're entire turn-over for the last 5 years" then the incentives for GM or Toyota or Ford to do recalls would be about on par with Tessla's and scandals like that wouldn't happen again.
Actually, when you look at it as a probability problem - the odds of somebody having exactly your DNA is on the order of a hundred trillion to one, considering only about a hundred billion people have ever lived - I must therefore conclude that it is unlikely to impossible for you to exist. Since the same math applies to all people, they must all be products of my fevered imagination and can therefore be safely ignored.
the radical difference between these results and bloodbank studies - which have universally agreed with the results from paternity tests despite having a random sampling.
It also does not factor in Kinsey's findings about adultery and child-conception which strongly supports the idea that most children conceived from affairs would be conceived with somebody closely related to the legal husband, that is to say, somebody likely to share his Y-chromosome.
Well that is the problem with using an inconstant refference value. The earth is still bulging meaning even the straight through the core line version of that measure is changing. Very slowly but still.
If it's a letter received in the mail - not served by an officer of the court - then there is no proof you ever received it, no way to prove the infringement was wilfull based on "I sent a letter".
If you are served by an officer of the court, then that implies that they've actually filed suit - in which case you had better respond. The burden of proof is on the accuser, accusing you of willful infringement has no weight in law unless there is proof that you knew about the patent, and "I wrote them a letter" is not proof.
And I've never met a democrat (at least one who was educated enough to know history) who denied that this was true, or did not consider it wrong.
In fact they go a step further than that, they not only acknowledge these facts, they acknowledge the lasting harmful impacts those policies had and try very hard to undo the damage and give the next generation better and more equal opportunities.
By opposing every effort at undoing the effects of past policies like the KKK and Jim Crow, the republicans have neatly stepped into the shoes vacated by the democrats when the latter embraced the civil rights act.
It's interesting that in the very next election the republican nominee was a man who *did* in fact call to restore all those things, the Trump-before-Trump named Barry Goldwater. He lost but four years later his prodigee won with an identical platform - not a single policy was altered, only the wording to take out the flagrant racist slurs and replace them with dog-whistles like "tough on crime", thus was born Nixon's Southern Strategy: it was Goldwater's "Bring back Jim Crow, down with civil rights for n**gers" with the n-word removed. In fact, Goldwater would become a senior and extremely powerful republican politician during the Nixon years and when the time came to tell Nixon "it's over, you had best resign" - he was one of the three top-dog republicans chosen to convey the message to the beleaguered tricky dick.
Indirectly, the goldwater-nixon-ford triangle would culminate in one of the biggest (and most liberalist) democratic landslides in American history with the election of Jimmy Carter. America hadn't had that liberal a candidate elected since FDR (even Kennedy wasn't close). Carter remains actively one of the most productive ex-presidents in America and has personally oversawn projects that eradicated a disease from this planet and is on the verge of eradicating another. Not a bad record for a president republicans truly despise eh ? Must be all that "I trust science and I want it's benefits available to the poorest people on the planet and I'm actually achieving that successfully" stuff.
And that, of course, is where it all falls appart - if you show anybody reality they don't want to believe -they will simply deny that it's reality and call it propaganda instead. Hence you get republicans who STILL believe that "cutting taxes for the rich" will improve the lives of everybody, decrease the deficit and create jobs - despite all the overwhelming proof from nearly 2 centuries of trying this everywhere on earth (including America) that it always and without exception ONLY achieves the exact OPPOSITE of all those aims. Yet their minds haven't changed in all the failures since this was still called "horse and sparrow economics" (a good name for it - since the poor and working class are literally expected to eat shit).
It's the same thing that keeps religious people religious, and racist people racist.
You can see a thousand videos of a woman walking through new york and hear the catcalls and the rape threats and everything else she is constantly subjected to - and you will ignore the evidence of your own eyes and refuse to acknowledge that a lot of men are seriously shit, way more than a normal distribution - which can only be explained by a cultural condition that allows men who act shit to get away with it (and encourages it).
Most people conclude that "hey - I should start calling out men who act like shit" - but sexists just call it "SJW propaganda" and pretend this means it doesn't really happen to anybody or say "I don't personally participate so I don't care and these women are terrible people who blame me for things I don't do" - which is a sentence with the curious attribute that not a single part of it is true.
1) If you do nothing to stop sexist behavior you ARE participating in it.
2) If you talk about yourself and what you do, or do not, do personally when this is pointed out to you - then you are dismissing the problem
3) Nobody was accusing all men - or you personally - just ENOUGH men to make ALL woman experience this.
See the difference. You may never have catcalled a woman in your life - but if you've never called somebody else an asshole for doing it, you've helped keep it happening. Women who point this stuff out are not blaming all men, or even MOST men - just the guilty ones, and asking the others to help.
It's easy to dismiss the suffering of others as propaganda, it's been a the core tactic of rightwing nutjobs for thousands of years and you are keeping that tradition very much alive. But dismissal doesn't make it false. Even if you call it whiny, and even if that's true, whinyness does not make something less true either.
Of course they have a right, and of course they shouldn't be arrested... but that does not mean we can't, as a society, encourage people to make choices that actually promote a healthy, harmonious (and thus prosperous) society - indeed, failing to do so would be grossly negligent by anybody who can see that diversity is a fundamental requirement for a successful team/organisation/company/city/country.
Limited or myopic viewpoints have never, in all of history, had anything but bad outcomes. We cannot and should not try to open minds by force -but we sure as fuck should be doing it by every OTHER means.
You can't actually experience things from other people's point of view in reality.
There is an ability called empathy that lets you get get close, but it only works if you have at least some overlapping experience to build on and a sense of relating to the people involved. This can be built (over many years) through conversation and observation, but very few people have either the desire or the willingness to engage in that.
If this is a short-cut to effective empathy - then it will have good and positive outcomes, if it doesn't work - well neither does the current method of choice so it's not like we actually *lost* anything.
And there it is in a nutshell. American exceptionalism. Its been bullshit in every nation that ever thought they were exceptional and it is bullshot now. I may be a foreigner but I have lived on 4 different continents in 12 different countries. If anything I know more than the Average American because my vision and experience is not so myopic. And if there is one thing I learned from living among all those cultures (including yours by the way) its that while they are all beautifull and unique none are exceptional. Every culture has wonderful things the world should emulate and horifying things they should change. Gun culture is one of the latter in your case.
>ALL Law is based on Contract Law.
Eeeeppp wrong. And you were doing so well up until then.
Contract law is a relatively modern invention - there are plenty of laws that predate it by millennia, and there are entire legal systems that never had contract law or anything that even vaguely resembles it.
Now you may argue that you meant "modern western free-world" law - but you would still be wrong, firstly quite a lot of the laws in the free world are also present in those other legal systems, and many of them entered the precursors to modern law before contract law did (which means they clearly do not depend on it).
Contract law can only apply to things where there is at least the possibility of legal consent by all involved parties. Laws that let companies get away with externalities flat out ignore contract law, ditto for laws that actually try to fine them for it to encourage internalizing costs. A law against murder is not based on contract law since there is no way you could legally consent to being killed (even if you wanted to die - you cannot legally consent to being a murder victim and the killer would still be committing a crime). Statutory rape would fall in exactly the same category: the very existence of a contract has been precluded by a law that precludes one of the parties from making the choice to enter one.
If every law is based on contract law, then every law prohibiting something must be about either ensuring compliance with contracts or ensuring the integrity of freedom of contract (that's all there is) - but in fact many laws actually restrict what contracts can exist, that's really not based on contract law, it's limitations of contract law - and many laws exist regardless of all contracts (all anti-violence laws).
Laws that prohibit selling something even with a willing-buyer are decidedly not based on contract law (i.e. drug bans or prostitution bans) - you may argue they are bad laws (and in many cases including both my examples I would agree) but they don't stop existing because you don't like them.
Contract law is certainly fundamental to western law and a great many laws can be well described as being based on it, but it's certainly not as universal as you believe.
What... like the old pirate-radio stations that broadcast from ships ?
Forget the boat-that-rocked, this is the 21st century... here comes the boat-that-torrented (actually - don't most boats do that on a regular basis already ? ... or is that just the worst pun ever ?).
In case you were unclear- all those lawsuits I spoke about never happened, and were never attempted - because they can't be. Those were all perfectly legal software and not even a copyright monster like Microsoft (and this is Balmer's microsoft) thought they could get away with it. All that software exists, is regularly used and downloaded - and is perfectly legal.
> If it acts the same and looks the same? Somehow you all are delusional thinking you are legally allowed to do this.
Yes... like all the times Microsoft sued OpenOffice.org for looking and acting exactly like MS-Office (often an earlier version)... or that time they sued IceWM for looking almost exactly like Windows95 (hell it even had a win95 theme). Or when Broderbund sued kgoldrunner for recreating the classic 80's loderunner game exactly. Or the lawsuit from Nintendo against Supertux for a near identical play clone of Mario.
Actually what you describe is not only perfectly legal - it's done all the time. A clean-room reverse-engineered recreation of a product is not only legal, it's specifically protected as a right by the law.
Copyright ? No. Patents: possibly, but if the car you recreate is more than 14 years old any patents would be expired.
It's a bit unclear - but assuming you're right, from the article it seems clear the quest data was recreated to match vanilla, a lot of that would have to be done from scratch - but if so, that would actually be valid copyright infringement. The text of the quests are clearly copyrightable, so are characters and some of the names are likely trademarked.
This may well be more about trademark protection than anything else though - if you allow somebody to offer a product substantially similar to yours, with a similar name who isn't you - that can mean losing your trademarks, which are valuable to blizzard. They really wouldn't to allow EA to be able to create EA-WoW "the not similar at all game with no reused content but the same name".
As far as I can tell - there was no copyright violation by the servers. The users agreed to a T.O.S. that prohibits them to connect to the server however. So I suspect the actual legal argument here is something akin to "provided the means to circumvent" ala DMCA - which really shouldn't have ever been illegal.
What I find odd is that the many private classic-wow emulating servers clearly proves a market for them exists. 800k accounts is tiny next to official WoW numbers which still more than an order of magnitude higher but they are a potential customer base and many existing players would likely join them but for loyalty to blizzard. So why not make money ? Blizzard could add a revenue stream by partnering with these guys and it would cost them nothing (not even legal fees). Or have one server running classic which players could opt into for little expense to them and likely improve their subscription retention rates.
Whether or not you approve of what pirate servers do American companies really are excessive in running to lawyers first. This is a missed opportunity to make ready cash from willing customers with no expense.
Wisconsin ? Aren't the gun-lovers there mostly actual deer hunters ?
Sorry, but that's just not a representative sample. Those towns in Texas where people insist they have a right to walk into a grocery store with an AR-15 in their hands and NOT be presumed armed robbers (at least if you're white) - now that's a representative sample of gun nuttery. I'm not a fan of hunting, I tolerate the idea but I don't support or participate in it. But hunters are by and large responsible gun owners. They simply are not valid samples for "gun lovers" however.
"The federal government is invalid" sovereign-citizen militian crazy people however - they probably shouldn't have guns. Almost no country that has gun control have eradicated legal guns (a few did, true, but this is neither the average nor the majority case). Canada despite very strict gun control actually has higher per-capita gun ownership than the U.S.
Gun control would have almost no impact in Wisconson. The kind of people it would affect, well the world is genuinely better off if they have to arm themselves with knives - or better yet - can't get a gun without comitting a crime and giving us a reason to put them in jail.
Guns for self-defense is a notoriously bad idea, it's literally the worst possible way to try and achieve that goal. Guns for good guys against bad guys - doesn't work. There are virtually NO examples where it has ever actually worked - it fundamentally relies on fatally failing to understand what happens to people in those circumstances. Nothing you can imagine comes close to it. In the real world - unless you are already highly trained(i.e. a cop or a veteran) even if you have a gun you will not be able to use it and the majority of times when somebody in such a situation actually managed to at least get a shot off - they ended up missing the shooter and hitting a bystander.
None of the reasons given not to control guns make any sense. There really is no sane reason to want to own a pistol or a revolver. Hell there is, for the most part, no sane reason to let a cop have one. Many countries do not - their cops aren't killed as often as American cops are and don't kill citizens as often either. They also have less crime.
In the end, statistically, the single most likely result of owning a handgun is you commit suicide with it - and the second most likely result is somebody you love gets shot by accident and the third most likely result is shooting somebody you love in a fit of rage. Self defence happens so rarely it's not even in the top 10 most likely things to happen. Nowhere that gun control was instituted did it get followed by increases in crime. It has never happened. It has always been followed by significant drops in the murder rate in fact. Which is supported by the fact that guns are useless for self defence in the first place. Oh, and quite a lot of people who did actually shoot intruders with their guns are now serving time for murder - because you can't do that, you only gain the right to use lethal force (anywhere in the free world in fact) in self defence when you have a genuine threat to your life or the lives of others. Courts have never held that you "there is somebody in my house" is reasonably translated into a genuine threat to your life without proof the person was at least armed and their weapon drawn. A threat to your television is not a threat that justifies killing somebody - and you will end up convicted of murder if you act like it does. Frankly the best way to mitigate that threat is to have home-insurance.
Guns don't make you safer. And only a coward needs something tangible that doesn't work to gain a feeling of safety. Much the same way I see a great deal of cowardice in religion (it's not wonder the two are so correlated). Fear of death coupled with the desperate desire to control the uncontrollable lets people keep deadly and useless things in their homes (actually endangering themselves for a false sense of security) and invent elaborate stories about how you get another life