I know this taxpayer is saying, "why can't our idiot local governments publish their routes so Google, Garmin, etc. can include them in their databases?"
If you have a Garmin GPS, one where you can load new maps, you have no excuse: footpaths, stairways, and trails are often listed in OpenStreetMap, although I guess the thoroughness of the map might depend on whether there have been people in your area who have been active in mapping.
Well, I readily admit that I'm not a flat tax expert. (though I believe I described and criticized the flat tax approaches to poverty I'm familiar with; I didn't say there were none). What am I missing?
I think other "flat" tax proposals include standard deductions (although lower than what we have now) to make sure that the really poor people aren't hit with the tax.
This isn't to say, of course, that Fair Tax doesn't have other problems (mainly the difficulty of doing two things simultaneously; repealing the 16th amendment and raising a new tax), but being regressive isn't one of them.
Somebody could have a big income, but spend like a person with an avereage income. How will you disproportionally punish him for doing well?
Why, by running high inflation and heavy regulation & taxing of businesses.
High inflation ensures that this big miserly border-line treacherous criminal will lose any money he saves in banking account, etc, forcing him to invest that money into businesses, if he wants to maintain the value of his money.
Once you've forced him to put the money into businesses, then you take the money from the businesses with various fees and what-not. (Some tweaking and fixes will be necessary, such as banning of owning gold and silver by members of public, as well as a ceiling on interest rates banks can pay on savings, but the general idea remains the same.)
There are many, many ways to "spread the wealth around" even without a progressive income tax. Progressive income tax just makes it easier.
Illegal immigrants can earn legal income, legal in the sense that they get to keep the money sans taxes.
Illegal income would be drug money and the like.
Not to mention that IRS is charged with taxing all income, legal and illegal. That's how people like Al Capone were brought in on tax evasion charges, rather than the bigger crimes they've committed (but couldn't be proven in court).
And I'd have thought the opposite. Someone stating "I believe there's a supernatural presence here in this room. I have no proof of it. I have no evidence of it. There's nothing that's ever indicated this to be true other than writings that are thousands of years old and were carried by the oral tradition for some number of years before ever even being written" would seem to be operating outside the objective world of science.
I don't know how other believing scientists do it, but here is how I have come to reconciliation: science does not explain everything. Furthermore, if a god like God of Christianity exists, then by all descriptions, he exists outside our universe (otherwise he would be a finite and limited god), not subject to the physical laws that bind this universe.
In physical sciences, we study the mechanisms of the world, but nothing beyond that. We describe how gravity works and how strong nuclear forces work, but not how they came to be. We can break things down to the fundamentals, but as is logically necessary, the fundamentals remain unexplained (there's a saying in mathematics: "God made the natural numbers; everything else is man-made").
As I have said, nothing in the physical sciences today precludes existence of God. Most of it do not even contradict the Bible provided that: (1) you interpret the initial few chapters of Genesis as being figurative, not literal and historical; (2) you allow for miracles—experimental science, just because of the way it works, can only deal with events and circumstances that can be recreated again and again, time after time; miracles are by definition one-time occurrences that cannot be subjected to rigors of experimental methods.
In the end, faith does come down to a personal matter, so any categorical statement may turn out to be wrong. But for every potential reason one might think physical scientists might be inclined less to believe in a god, there's an argument to be made that they might actually be more inclined. One example: you might think that mechanically minded people, who see the world as a big machine with no unexplained parts, wouldn't want a meddler like a god—but then, mechanically minded people also might be more inclined to believe in an intelligent designer who made that machine.
Buddhism is hardly a minor religion (fifth largest according to wikipedia) and one of its precepts is not to take any life.
Indeed. But I think few Buddhists follow that precept. First, only the monks are required to lead a vegetarian life (so that they may not kill in order to eat). Second, I don't know exactly how they justify their actions, but even Tibetan monks engage in acts of terrorism/insurgency against China. (I'm not saying that the acts, if what the Chinese allege are true, are wrong in itself; I'm just saying, as an outsider, that any act of violence, even for a good cause, seems to be in contradiction to the faith.)
I think the biggest strike against Buddhism as a promoter of world peace is its limited impact: its influence is largely limited to Asia; I know of no significant Buddhist groups in U.S. or Europe and not because of any persecution against Buddhists. I think Buddhism is too passive a religion to have any worldwide impact. Even in Korea, where Buddhists outnumber Christians 2 to 1 (or better, I think), the modern culture is more sharply defined by Christian churches and the church-goers than Buddhist temples and their faithfuls (and I think a good number of present and past Korean presidents have been Christians, not Buddhists).
Every generation has had its share of apocalypse. Perhaps on this single pale blue dot we could promote pacifism as the ideal and agree to just not kill each other over the ideas in our head. Respecting differences and promoting the good of all - undivided, is more scalable than bickering and bloodshed?
Ah, so that is the religion you would like to see. I can respect that (even while thinking it unrealistic).
Unfortunately, the religions we do have on this earth do not aspire to or approach such idealism. Not the major ones, anyway (how many followers does Taoism have?).
scientists, in general, do not have strong views against religion. Scientists are used to politely disagreeing with people that do not share their views, and having their views challenged and proven wrong. it is the uneducated that have complete certainty in their opinions want to kill everyone that disagrees with them.
That's a rather uneducated view of scientists. Speaking as a scientist (physicist, in particular), scientists can be a contentious lot, in matters they care about. It may be that a lot of scientists just don't care for religion, but that's not to say scientists are somehow natural pacifists.
You don't have to go far to find examples of educated scientists who have been responsible for many deaths, out of religious or nationalist zeal, from Maj. Hasan (to the extent you consider psychiatry a "science") to the physicists at Los Alamos at the end of World War II.
Scientists are not angels. They are human, who are no better than the general population.
I'm also willing to bet that people in hard sciences, like physics, chemistry etc are far more likely to be atheists than for example sociologists or historians.
As a practicing physicist, I'd be willing to bet against that.
Aside from the fact that academics do tend to be less religious for whatever reason (just as they tend to be more liberal for whatever reason), I don't see why physicists or chemists would be more likely to be atheists than historians, psychologists, or biologists.
For one, most of our work does not contradict religious doctrines—in fact, the Catholic Church was very happy about Big Bang theory when it was proposed—or deal with anything religious, meaning whether you believe in a god or not should have no impact on whether you can perform the necessary work, experimental and theoretical.
In another, if you believe there is this hostile environment in the academia for believers, in hard sciences, your work at least can be judged by relatively objective standard (i.e. is the experiment reproducible? does the theory predict verifiable experimental results?), meaning believing scientists have better chance of surviving in physical sciences.
I mean, "let there be light", isn't it a lot like what we envision the Big Bang to be? On a level that a more "primitive" human could understand?
Heh. Or the ancient Greek theories of atoms? In beginning his lecture series, Richard Feynman says that if he could pass on one piece of knowledge to some post-apocalyptic world, it would be this: "everything is made of atoms". So you could imagine a scenario of where ancient, advanced human civilization (or God) did just that, except it all got garbled and wasn't useful for anything until alchemists started cataloging elements.
But... this is at best a creative revisionism, or a highly entertaining speculation. Although one in which authors such as Orson Scott Card engage in, in his series on Biblical figures.
Religion covers evaluations such as: "Is it a good idea to develop weapons of mass destruction?"
Hardly.
Geopolitics and realities of war answers those questions, and at least if our experience of last 60 years say anything, in the affirmative (do you really believe 20th century would've been more peaceful if U.S. didn't develop nukes by the end of WWII?).
As a believing physicist, I really can't see how religion answers "is it a good idea to develop weapons of mass destruction". Since no figure in Bible built nukes or any such things, no lessons can be drawn from anywhere. Killing in itself is rather an ambiguous practice, as personified in David (a good king whose good deeds were mostly in the battlefield, and yet, forbidden from building the temple because he shed blood). So, unless you somehow perceive yourself as God in building these weapons of apocalypse, all but extremely pacifist religions (Hinduism and Buddhism, perhaps?) are silent on this question.
The problem is with more with scientists (or pseudo-scientists, a.k.a. "social scientists" like psychologists) who present the frontiers of research, where "facts" change from year to year as settled science. There is a core of settled science that will not change in the next few millennia, such as Newtonian mechanics (plus special and general relativity, just because GPS system will have hard time working unless these are accounted for) as damn good approximation to every day experience, and no member of public, no matter how "ignorant" they are, will dispute them.
Scientists should be honest about when their theories and hypotheses are far from proven (and proof, in last century's scientific standard, consists of producing verifiable predictions that no one would've guessed absent the theory; the more the verifications under more varied scenarios the better) and hold their ground only when they know that the ground they stand on is solid.
Instead, when they try to beat over the public's head with their latest theories and yet unverified predictions, changing their story every few years, they only lose the public's confidence.
By the way, belief isn't static either—there is a horde of theologians who would be aghast at hearing such a thing (and how do you explain gay and women bishops getting ordained, if belief were truly static). The difference between leaders of beliefs and "leaders" of science is that leaders of belief focus on the unchanging core of truth (or "truth", if you prefer), such as existence of a just God (which is, at least, unfalsifiable), while "leaders" of science are constantly distracted by the latest fads.
As a Kindle 2 owner who just had his Kindle updated to 2.5 firmware (which has this feature), I can tell you that this feature is off by default. In order for Amazon to actually share your highlights (of course, who knows if they're collecting it silently in the background; it's their system after all), you have to actively turn on this feature.
I've also seen Kindle for iPad. I don't recall whether this feature was on by default, but it is rather prominently displayed on their relatively simple options menu. If you have privacy concerns, it's fairly simple to turn it off.
These aren't people on a 3 year HW replacement cycle and don't care about power so they're not going to go out and jump for another machine.
Even if they were, netbooks have been out for only 3 years or so. The people replacing their first netbook would be early adopters, which aren't really huge crowds, unless they happen to be Apple fans.
Oh, I don't know. Asus's Eee line (the original netbook, unless you count OLPC whose design has been around for a while before Eee came out) is still designed and sold along the same line: cheap ($350 for most models), small, and long battery life. Given that this is, what, third year since first Eee came out, perhaps you can blame lack of innovation for drop in netbook sales, but I wouldn't blame manufacturers of losing their ways.
I personally blame U.S. climbing out of recession. Someone I personally know was looking for a small laptop recently and instead of a cheap netbook, he decided on a full-fledged notebook (same size, but with dual-core processors and more RAM, I think). But maybe the actual data doesn't support this hunch... (esp. if notebook sales are more or less the same).
What if you are a citizen but speak accented english, or you prefer to speak another language. A cop suspects you are an immigrant and demands immigration papers. Does the cop detain you at that point?
You can just say, "I am a U.S. citizen." You will be surprised how little documentation you need to prove your assertion that you are a U.S. citizen, or rather, how willing government officials are to believe you when you make that assertion. It's only when you cross borders you actually need some documentation, and at least 6 years ago or so, U.S. citizens coming from Mexico needed little more than a driver's license (itself not actually a proof of citizenship) and their word that they are U.S. citizen.
This attitude does come with a severe potential penalty though, if you are, in fact, not a U.S. citizen. For one, you can forget about ever becoming naturalized—one of the questions they ask you during the naturalization process is if you've ever lied about your citizenship to government officials (and if you lie during your naturalization process, your citizenship is forfeit when the lie is discovered later... I'm not sure if there's a statute of limitation, but the way I understood it you were never a citizen if you perjured yourself in the naturalization process).
And, you know, THIS story is about someone changing a song for satire, which is still illegal, so, you know, you lose again, you limpdick fuckstained cuntflap.
I have never argued against that, although I am perplexed why parody is fair use while satire is not, and I would be happy to see satire covered under fair use as well (provided that the use of work was substantially transformative). But that's legally unexplored ground, and I will not be able to make an as strong an argument as I could with compulsory licensing, which is based on (at least) a century of copyright laws (to borrow a well-known politician's wording on a completely different SCOTUS case). So I didn't go there.
What I did argue against (and you can look back at my specific blockquoting of your original post) was your quoting examples of perfectly legal and normal actions as some kind of Republican corruption/unlawfulness/asshattery.
In any case, as you are proving to be a completely irrational opponent in a rational argument and I have made all the fact-based arguments I (or really, anyone who's not just out to call names) could possibly make, this will be my last post on this thread. I hate going in circles.
And if one reads the Wikipedia article (first hit), you'll find that Chucky has no chance in hell in this case:
And if you will read my post, you'll find that I wasn't talking about Chucky. I was specifically talking about the issue with the McCain campaigns use of some songs (which clearly fell under compulsory licensing, because they were just playing a music to Gov. Palin's entrance), and the reason I was talking about that particular case is because OP brought it up—and I happened to remember that case well from 2008.
I make no contention that Chucky's use is covered by compulsory licensing—compulsory licensing was never designed for making derivative works (although if one were proposed for some types of derivative works, I would gladly support it). I only disagree that somehow Republicans (or Democrats) habitually "steal music" in defiance of U.S. copyright law.
Read it and get back to me when you actually understand it. If you can explain how it applies in this case, I'll be pretty impressed.
I didn't say it applied in this case. I said it applied to the McCain campaign case (one of the cases of Rethuglikkkans "stealing music", I suppose, at least according to you), where they simply played some song to the entrance of Gov. Palin.
But if you can understand the above sentence, given the reading comprehension you've displayed so far, I'll be pretty impressed.
In your defense, I did misspell it. It's "compulsory licensing", not "compulsive licensing". It's a well-established legal practice (it dates from late 19th and early 20th century, when faithful reproduction of a work became easy with radios, etc.).
Read Lessig's Free Culture, if you want to inform yourself properly. He'll explain it better than I can anyway.
It's pretty amazing how often they do it, and get away with it despite the protests and legal actions of the artists involved. It's the Republican party saying, "We don't have to play by the rules, fuck you!" to artists who disagree with them. Classy.
It's not quite so clear as far as accusations of "stealing" goes. There is something called compulsive licensing (for example, a radio station playing a music does not have to individually seek permission of the artist; it just has to pay a rate set by law). So, by law, anyone can play the music publicly as long as they pay the license fee set by law, no individualized permission from artists needed (and given the compulsive nature of this licensing, I doubt they can revoke this congress-granted permission; Lessig talks about this as being a case where Congress balanced the rights of copyright holders with public good).
Especially in the McCain campaign case, you will read about the artists returning the license fee—that's because McCain campaign played the music legally and paid the legally set license fee, as required by law. The artists can refuse the fee as a publicity thing if they want, but that doesn't change the fact that McCain campaign fulfilled all its obligations under the law.
Of course, why they would want to promote artists whose political views diverge so far from conservative views is baffling to me, but in any case, the only sense in which the campaign "stole music" is in the sense in which McCain campaign didn't seek permission that they didn't have to seek under the current law (but some people, like Weird Al, do seek such permission even if he doesn't have to, so you could argue it as a matter of courtesy—but not as a matter of law, as "stealing" implies).
As I understand it, however, even if you re-record someone's music, it's still subject to copyright.
Two different copyrights. Copyright on the performance (akin to copyright on movies or recordings of a play performance) vs. copyright on the music score (akin to copyright on movie scripts or plays themselves). I think there are some differences in how the two are treated in terms of length and compulsive licensing, but it's the copyright on the music score that gets you if you, e.g. publicly perform copyrighted music like "Happy Birthday".
1. Then you shouldn't have gone to the "hell hole" in the first place.
I didn't. I was flying from India to a stop in London. I have made it my long-time goal to set foot in the Europe (especially the ungrateful western Europe) as little as possible. If they had direct flights to London that fit my schedule, I would've taken that.
As for planes falling out of sky, flights to U.S. fly over water most of the way (there's a big body of water between U.S. and Europe, as you might recall—another thing I'm thankful for). If it really goes down (highly unlikely scenario, given that the ash threats were minimal at best in the first place), it would have mostly likely been over water. In general, airplanes simply dropping out of sky do not crash-land into populated areas—unless it was by design as in Lockerbie, but unless we have terrorist pilots, they would at least know to crash-land into wide fields or forests.
In any case, I did learn my lesson. If I travel to India again (as seems likely), I'm flying over the Pacific, not Atlantic. Even flying over or a short layover in Europe is hazardous to my health.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have a Garmin GPS, one where you can load new maps, you have no excuse: footpaths, stairways, and trails are often listed in OpenStreetMap, although I guess the thoroughness of the map might depend on whether there have been people in your area who have been active in mapping.
In case of Fair Tax, you are missing prebates.
I think other "flat" tax proposals include standard deductions (although lower than what we have now) to make sure that the really poor people aren't hit with the tax.
This isn't to say, of course, that Fair Tax doesn't have other problems (mainly the difficulty of doing two things simultaneously; repealing the 16th amendment and raising a new tax), but being regressive isn't one of them.
Why, by running high inflation and heavy regulation & taxing of businesses.
High inflation ensures that this big miserly border-line treacherous criminal will lose any money he saves in banking account, etc, forcing him to invest that money into businesses, if he wants to maintain the value of his money.
Once you've forced him to put the money into businesses, then you take the money from the businesses with various fees and what-not. (Some tweaking and fixes will be necessary, such as banning of owning gold and silver by members of public, as well as a ceiling on interest rates banks can pay on savings, but the general idea remains the same.)
There are many, many ways to "spread the wealth around" even without a progressive income tax. Progressive income tax just makes it easier.
Not to mention that IRS is charged with taxing all income, legal and illegal. That's how people like Al Capone were brought in on tax evasion charges, rather than the bigger crimes they've committed (but couldn't be proven in court).
I don't know how other believing scientists do it, but here is how I have come to reconciliation: science does not explain everything. Furthermore, if a god like God of Christianity exists, then by all descriptions, he exists outside our universe (otherwise he would be a finite and limited god), not subject to the physical laws that bind this universe.
In physical sciences, we study the mechanisms of the world, but nothing beyond that. We describe how gravity works and how strong nuclear forces work, but not how they came to be. We can break things down to the fundamentals, but as is logically necessary, the fundamentals remain unexplained (there's a saying in mathematics: "God made the natural numbers; everything else is man-made").
As I have said, nothing in the physical sciences today precludes existence of God. Most of it do not even contradict the Bible provided that: (1) you interpret the initial few chapters of Genesis as being figurative, not literal and historical; (2) you allow for miracles—experimental science, just because of the way it works, can only deal with events and circumstances that can be recreated again and again, time after time; miracles are by definition one-time occurrences that cannot be subjected to rigors of experimental methods.
In the end, faith does come down to a personal matter, so any categorical statement may turn out to be wrong. But for every potential reason one might think physical scientists might be inclined less to believe in a god, there's an argument to be made that they might actually be more inclined. One example: you might think that mechanically minded people, who see the world as a big machine with no unexplained parts, wouldn't want a meddler like a god—but then, mechanically minded people also might be more inclined to believe in an intelligent designer who made that machine.
Indeed. But I think few Buddhists follow that precept. First, only the monks are required to lead a vegetarian life (so that they may not kill in order to eat). Second, I don't know exactly how they justify their actions, but even Tibetan monks engage in acts of terrorism/insurgency against China. (I'm not saying that the acts, if what the Chinese allege are true, are wrong in itself; I'm just saying, as an outsider, that any act of violence, even for a good cause, seems to be in contradiction to the faith.)
I think the biggest strike against Buddhism as a promoter of world peace is its limited impact: its influence is largely limited to Asia; I know of no significant Buddhist groups in U.S. or Europe and not because of any persecution against Buddhists. I think Buddhism is too passive a religion to have any worldwide impact. Even in Korea, where Buddhists outnumber Christians 2 to 1 (or better, I think), the modern culture is more sharply defined by Christian churches and the church-goers than Buddhist temples and their faithfuls (and I think a good number of present and past Korean presidents have been Christians, not Buddhists).
Ah, so that is the religion you would like to see. I can respect that (even while thinking it unrealistic).
Unfortunately, the religions we do have on this earth do not aspire to or approach such idealism. Not the major ones, anyway (how many followers does Taoism have?).
That's a rather uneducated view of scientists. Speaking as a scientist (physicist, in particular), scientists can be a contentious lot, in matters they care about. It may be that a lot of scientists just don't care for religion, but that's not to say scientists are somehow natural pacifists.
You don't have to go far to find examples of educated scientists who have been responsible for many deaths, out of religious or nationalist zeal, from Maj. Hasan (to the extent you consider psychiatry a "science") to the physicists at Los Alamos at the end of World War II.
Scientists are not angels. They are human, who are no better than the general population.
As a practicing physicist, I'd be willing to bet against that.
Aside from the fact that academics do tend to be less religious for whatever reason (just as they tend to be more liberal for whatever reason), I don't see why physicists or chemists would be more likely to be atheists than historians, psychologists, or biologists.
For one, most of our work does not contradict religious doctrines—in fact, the Catholic Church was very happy about Big Bang theory when it was proposed—or deal with anything religious, meaning whether you believe in a god or not should have no impact on whether you can perform the necessary work, experimental and theoretical.
In another, if you believe there is this hostile environment in the academia for believers, in hard sciences, your work at least can be judged by relatively objective standard (i.e. is the experiment reproducible? does the theory predict verifiable experimental results?), meaning believing scientists have better chance of surviving in physical sciences.
Heh. Or the ancient Greek theories of atoms? In beginning his lecture series, Richard Feynman says that if he could pass on one piece of knowledge to some post-apocalyptic world, it would be this: "everything is made of atoms". So you could imagine a scenario of where ancient, advanced human civilization (or God) did just that, except it all got garbled and wasn't useful for anything until alchemists started cataloging elements.
But ... this is at best a creative revisionism, or a highly entertaining speculation. Although one in which authors such as Orson Scott Card engage in, in his series on Biblical figures.
Hardly.
Geopolitics and realities of war answers those questions, and at least if our experience of last 60 years say anything, in the affirmative (do you really believe 20th century would've been more peaceful if U.S. didn't develop nukes by the end of WWII?).
As a believing physicist, I really can't see how religion answers "is it a good idea to develop weapons of mass destruction". Since no figure in Bible built nukes or any such things, no lessons can be drawn from anywhere. Killing in itself is rather an ambiguous practice, as personified in David (a good king whose good deeds were mostly in the battlefield, and yet, forbidden from building the temple because he shed blood). So, unless you somehow perceive yourself as God in building these weapons of apocalypse, all but extremely pacifist religions (Hinduism and Buddhism, perhaps?) are silent on this question.
The problem is with more with scientists (or pseudo-scientists, a.k.a. "social scientists" like psychologists) who present the frontiers of research, where "facts" change from year to year as settled science. There is a core of settled science that will not change in the next few millennia, such as Newtonian mechanics (plus special and general relativity, just because GPS system will have hard time working unless these are accounted for) as damn good approximation to every day experience, and no member of public, no matter how "ignorant" they are, will dispute them.
Scientists should be honest about when their theories and hypotheses are far from proven (and proof, in last century's scientific standard, consists of producing verifiable predictions that no one would've guessed absent the theory; the more the verifications under more varied scenarios the better) and hold their ground only when they know that the ground they stand on is solid.
Instead, when they try to beat over the public's head with their latest theories and yet unverified predictions, changing their story every few years, they only lose the public's confidence.
By the way, belief isn't static either—there is a horde of theologians who would be aghast at hearing such a thing (and how do you explain gay and women bishops getting ordained, if belief were truly static). The difference between leaders of beliefs and "leaders" of science is that leaders of belief focus on the unchanging core of truth (or "truth", if you prefer), such as existence of a just God (which is, at least, unfalsifiable), while "leaders" of science are constantly distracted by the latest fads.
As a Kindle 2 owner who just had his Kindle updated to 2.5 firmware (which has this feature), I can tell you that this feature is off by default. In order for Amazon to actually share your highlights (of course, who knows if they're collecting it silently in the background; it's their system after all), you have to actively turn on this feature.
I've also seen Kindle for iPad. I don't recall whether this feature was on by default, but it is rather prominently displayed on their relatively simple options menu. If you have privacy concerns, it's fairly simple to turn it off.
Even if they were, netbooks have been out for only 3 years or so. The people replacing their first netbook would be early adopters, which aren't really huge crowds, unless they happen to be Apple fans.
Oh, I don't know. Asus's Eee line (the original netbook, unless you count OLPC whose design has been around for a while before Eee came out) is still designed and sold along the same line: cheap ($350 for most models), small, and long battery life. Given that this is, what, third year since first Eee came out, perhaps you can blame lack of innovation for drop in netbook sales, but I wouldn't blame manufacturers of losing their ways.
I personally blame U.S. climbing out of recession. Someone I personally know was looking for a small laptop recently and instead of a cheap netbook, he decided on a full-fledged notebook (same size, but with dual-core processors and more RAM, I think). But maybe the actual data doesn't support this hunch ... (esp. if notebook sales are more or less the same).
No, it is a Slashvertisment, just for GNU Octave, rather than MATLAB.
The only question is, who'll be charged for what: Tina Fey, for impersonating Sarah Palin; or Sarah Palin, for impersonating Tina Fey.
You can just say, "I am a U.S. citizen." You will be surprised how little documentation you need to prove your assertion that you are a U.S. citizen, or rather, how willing government officials are to believe you when you make that assertion. It's only when you cross borders you actually need some documentation, and at least 6 years ago or so, U.S. citizens coming from Mexico needed little more than a driver's license (itself not actually a proof of citizenship) and their word that they are U.S. citizen.
This attitude does come with a severe potential penalty though, if you are, in fact, not a U.S. citizen. For one, you can forget about ever becoming naturalized—one of the questions they ask you during the naturalization process is if you've ever lied about your citizenship to government officials (and if you lie during your naturalization process, your citizenship is forfeit when the lie is discovered later ... I'm not sure if there's a statute of limitation, but the way I understood it you were never a citizen if you perjured yourself in the naturalization process).
I have never argued against that, although I am perplexed why parody is fair use while satire is not, and I would be happy to see satire covered under fair use as well (provided that the use of work was substantially transformative). But that's legally unexplored ground, and I will not be able to make an as strong an argument as I could with compulsory licensing, which is based on (at least) a century of copyright laws (to borrow a well-known politician's wording on a completely different SCOTUS case). So I didn't go there.
What I did argue against (and you can look back at my specific blockquoting of your original post) was your quoting examples of perfectly legal and normal actions as some kind of Republican corruption/unlawfulness/asshattery.
In any case, as you are proving to be a completely irrational opponent in a rational argument and I have made all the fact-based arguments I (or really, anyone who's not just out to call names) could possibly make, this will be my last post on this thread. I hate going in circles.
And if you will read my post, you'll find that I wasn't talking about Chucky. I was specifically talking about the issue with the McCain campaigns use of some songs (which clearly fell under compulsory licensing, because they were just playing a music to Gov. Palin's entrance), and the reason I was talking about that particular case is because OP brought it up—and I happened to remember that case well from 2008.
I make no contention that Chucky's use is covered by compulsory licensing—compulsory licensing was never designed for making derivative works (although if one were proposed for some types of derivative works, I would gladly support it). I only disagree that somehow Republicans (or Democrats) habitually "steal music" in defiance of U.S. copyright law.
I didn't say it applied in this case. I said it applied to the McCain campaign case (one of the cases of Rethuglikkkans "stealing music", I suppose, at least according to you), where they simply played some song to the entrance of Gov. Palin.
But if you can understand the above sentence, given the reading comprehension you've displayed so far, I'll be pretty impressed.
Let me Google that for you.
In your defense, I did misspell it. It's "compulsory licensing", not "compulsive licensing". It's a well-established legal practice (it dates from late 19th and early 20th century, when faithful reproduction of a work became easy with radios, etc.).
Read Lessig's Free Culture, if you want to inform yourself properly. He'll explain it better than I can anyway.
Oh, right. Since you can't use Google, here's the link to Free Culture (he has a PDF there).
It's not quite so clear as far as accusations of "stealing" goes. There is something called compulsive licensing (for example, a radio station playing a music does not have to individually seek permission of the artist; it just has to pay a rate set by law). So, by law, anyone can play the music publicly as long as they pay the license fee set by law, no individualized permission from artists needed (and given the compulsive nature of this licensing, I doubt they can revoke this congress-granted permission; Lessig talks about this as being a case where Congress balanced the rights of copyright holders with public good).
Especially in the McCain campaign case, you will read about the artists returning the license fee—that's because McCain campaign played the music legally and paid the legally set license fee, as required by law. The artists can refuse the fee as a publicity thing if they want, but that doesn't change the fact that McCain campaign fulfilled all its obligations under the law.
Of course, why they would want to promote artists whose political views diverge so far from conservative views is baffling to me, but in any case, the only sense in which the campaign "stole music" is in the sense in which McCain campaign didn't seek permission that they didn't have to seek under the current law (but some people, like Weird Al, do seek such permission even if he doesn't have to, so you could argue it as a matter of courtesy—but not as a matter of law, as "stealing" implies).
Two different copyrights. Copyright on the performance (akin to copyright on movies or recordings of a play performance) vs. copyright on the music score (akin to copyright on movie scripts or plays themselves). I think there are some differences in how the two are treated in terms of length and compulsive licensing, but it's the copyright on the music score that gets you if you, e.g. publicly perform copyrighted music like "Happy Birthday".
I didn't. I was flying from India to a stop in London. I have made it my long-time goal to set foot in the Europe (especially the ungrateful western Europe) as little as possible. If they had direct flights to London that fit my schedule, I would've taken that.
As for planes falling out of sky, flights to U.S. fly over water most of the way (there's a big body of water between U.S. and Europe, as you might recall—another thing I'm thankful for). If it really goes down (highly unlikely scenario, given that the ash threats were minimal at best in the first place), it would have mostly likely been over water. In general, airplanes simply dropping out of sky do not crash-land into populated areas—unless it was by design as in Lockerbie, but unless we have terrorist pilots, they would at least know to crash-land into wide fields or forests.
In any case, I did learn my lesson. If I travel to India again (as seems likely), I'm flying over the Pacific, not Atlantic. Even flying over or a short layover in Europe is hazardous to my health.