Any law can be misused but that does not mean that the law is irrational.
I never even mentioned the ADA directly. I never said it was irrational as a whole. In fact, as I said multiple times, I firmly believe that accommodations should be provided for people when possible and reasonable. What I did say is that people who look at the law need to be reasonable.
Since none of these "cases" have even been filed there is no way to know that they would ever succeed.
Umm, some did succeed. That doesn't mean that they would succeed in all the places that it is threatened, but do you seriously think that no one has ever sued a business for an ADA violation and succeeded?
Generalizing the thoughts of all law enforcement from the actions of two officers is not valid. The thing that "is amiss" the the two officers and not the laws.
I didn't generalize about the thoughts of all law enforcement from what I clearly identified as an "anecdote." Did you? I have more anecdotal accounts from friends if you'd like... but that wouldn't constitute evidence of what "all law enforcement" think, either.
If I were to generalize about what was going on, it wouldn't be anything about the ADA, but rather about the potential for fine revenue. Either they were overly sensitive to the plight of the handicapped (possible) or they were paying closer attention to handicapped spots because of the greater fines involved (also possible, and quite likely). Probably both.
In my city, parking too close to hydrants, too close to intersections, etc. is far too common. But no one ever gets ticketed for it, because unless it's particularly egregious, someone would have to get a tape measure and check the distance (my city long ago stopped properly painting sidewalks around such things to let you know where you can't park). Every single day on my street, directly across from my house, an illegal spot that can't exist (because it is between a fire hydrant and an intersection) is filled with a car. Those cars are never ticketed.
Until recently, the fine for street cleaning was higher than both of those other fines. I think they finally raised the fire hydrant fine, but parking too close to an intersection (and obstructing visibility) is still only about half a street cleaning fine. So who do you think they pay attention to? The city makes over 1/3 of its revenue from street cleaning fines, so that's what the law enforcement is interested in... not public safety. And yes, I will generalize about that, since it is demonstrably true. The city council folks admit that they make a great portion of their budget from street cleaning, and they know it's one of the easiest things to ticket for (because the irregular schedule for it is arcane enough that people forget about it).
Ultimately, most of these things are about money, and lawsuits and fines for handicapped violations tend to bring greater rewards than most. That I will generalize about. And that's the problem here. We should be weighing a lot of factors reasonably, but that often doesn't happen around the ADA and disabled policies.
In many cities, the right thing to do would be to get a permit and post signs 72 hours in advance to take legal parking spots out of service, by creating a "Temporary No parking zone" you can then use for your loading.
Seriously? We had about 9 people meeting up at a spot to head out on a road trip. This was just an informal thing. We had to do it at that location because some equipment was in the building there. All the cars arrived and left within 5-7 minutes. I'm not exaggerating. For that, you want us to go to the trouble of going to City Hall and putting up "No Parking" signs (which will inevitably inconvenience a lot of people that day... or inconvenience us, since when I've put up such signs when I was moving in the past, I had to call the police each time to get them to move the cars that didn't heed the temporary no parking signs)?
In any case... just taking the handicapped spot isn't legal.
I agree. But we weren't permanently parked in the spot. At best, we were "stopped" in the spot for a couple minutes.
And the penalty for doing so is likely higher than having your car parked too close to an intersection.
That is undoubtedly true. So, in your world, all we should care about are the meaningless numbers made up regarding fine values, rather than what actually matters to public safety? Cars that obstruct view by being too close to an intersection are an actual safety hazard, even if they are only parked there for a few minutes. That's why those are often no only "no parking" but also "no stopping" zones. There was no hazard created by a car parked in the handicapped space for a couple minutes, and we would have gladly relocated it if anyone came along.
Of course, we don't actually have a democracy in the U.S. (despite the rhetoric, we've never had more than a representative republic, except occasionally on very local scales). But we do have enough of the bad characteristics of democratic systems influencing our government that Plato's critique probably applies. And one could make an argument that the U.S. has been moving its way through the progression of Plato's theory of government degeneration: "aristocracy" (learned founders, who designed a system that was based on successive levels of disconnect from democratic opinion --who could vote was limited, Senate was elected by legislatures, President was elected by a "college" of electors, etc.), then "timocracy" (expansionist phase in the U.S.), "oligarchy" (concentration of power in the super-rich in the late 19th and early 20th century), and since the various rights movements, closer to true "democracy," with ever-encroaching hints at tyranny as our rights are gradually degraded.
Note that I don't necessarily agree with Plato completely, and the mapping is not exact. But his prized form of "aristocracy" (which is more like a meritocratic government founded on smart people) has really never been tried, outside of Star Trek perhaps.
The current length of copyright is approximately a lifetime, ostensibly to ensure their works can benefit the author until their death.
Umm, no it isn't. The current length of copyright (for works published in 1978 or after) in the U.S. for individuals is 70 years AFTER THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR. For corporations, it is 120 years after creation, or 95 years after publication, whichever is shorter. (For works before 1978, the current term is 95 years.)
Most other countries also now explicitly grant copyright that extends upwards from 50 years after the death of the author. It isn't about anyone's lifetime at all, personal or corporate. It's just about greed and Mickey Mouse.
The original idea of copyright is to encourage further creation of artistic works, not to reward someone with a windfall that will support them (and their heirs) for the rest of their days. 14 years plus an optional 14 year renewal seems more than plenty to me. Any work that is still making money after 28 years is probably a "classic" that deserves to be in the public domain, and if it took more than 28 years for the work to get attention in the first place... well, let's just say that such things are rare and that rewarding an author in the circumstance is unlikely to have the intended effect of leading to more works. Either the writer left the profession long ago, or is dead, or has continued to write anyway either from success from other works or because of some other monetary support that allows that.
I'm not willing to even grant your premise about supporting an individual for a lifetime, let alone extending such logic to a corporation.
Empty parking spots all over the world that most people aren't allowed to use, which of course clutters up the rest of the parking lot. Just something to think about.
That's not interesting. Not even the slightest bit. So we over-assign handicapped spots to try and make sure that when several truly handicapped people are at the store...
I thoroughly believe that we should have spaces available for those who need it, as well as other appropriate accommodations. But I think the GP brings up a larger issue, which is when it gets to be too much -- when laws and attempts to accommodate are so important due to political correctness that they trump reason.
For example, I remember hearing a news story a year or two back about a guy who was going around some state (I think California) and suing any business that didn't follow rather restrictive and arbitrary laws about accommodations to the letter. He would just show up in a town, wander around, and a month later, half a dozen businesses would get threatened with a lawsuit. Often, because of space issues or building design issues or whatever, the businesses couldn't actually put in whatever random accommodation, so they would settle -- effectively paying shake-down money to this guy.
Is this common? I don't know. The news story mentioned one other lawyer accused of doing a similar scheme. But our collective sensitivity to the issue led to irrational laws that support such behavior.
Another personal anecdote: a few years back I was meeting up with some people to go on a short road trip outside of a building in an area with limited parking. We had three cars, one of which was parked in front of a fire hydrant too close to an intersection, one of which was parked in a loading/tow zone, and one parked in a handicapped spot. (There were two handicapped spots there, and the other was empty: in fact, these spots weren't convenient to any important buildings, so I'm not sure I had ever seen cars parked there.) All had flashers on, and we were only there for a couple minutes. It was obvious we were packing stuff in cars and were all there with the cars, and if two cars had suddenly shown up for the handicapped spots, we would have gladly moved.
A police car drives by. They stop and ask about the car in the spot. We explain the situation -- that we're loading up, there's another empty space, we'll be gone in a minute, etc. They don't care: we have to move. They say nothing about the two other cars parked illegally, including the one that was actually a traffic safety hazard.
So, we pull the car out of the space and also into an illegal parking spot too close to an intersection. That satisfies the police, and they drive away.
Again, I'm all for providing accommodations. But when law enforcement is happier with cars stopped in hazardous No Parking zones rather than take up one of two empty handicapped spaces that are never used anyway, something's a little amiss.
Note that I have serious problems with the copyright system today.
but copyright was only "discovered" 3 centuries ago, after the first information technology revolution swept England.
No it wasn't. It was created in Italy in the late 1400s. Go read some history instead of the anti-copyright wacko pamphlets. The most direct ancestor of the U.S. copyright system is the British system, which was reformed under the Statute of Anne in 1709 (which, by the way, was a heck of lot better than what existed before then in England). But that's not the beginning of copyright by any means.
If you favor the pragmatic argument that it incentivizes creativity, can you show evidence it works?
Yes, it's called the Renaissance. It happened long before all your English 18th-century fat cats. And it didn't so much provide incentives to authors (who generally were being paid by a patron) as it encouraged publishers' investment in distributing a wide variety of high-quality works.
Oh, and, I don't know, a lot of published work in the 19th century, after the patronage system fell apart and writers actually had to earn money on their own.
I don't deny that copyright has been used for a lot of bad things over the years. But I'm also not going to pretend, like it appears you do, that no member of the public and no creators ever benefited significantly from it.
I'm getting really tired of hearing rants by people about history who don't bother to know anything about it.
They contain mercury vapor, but it doesn't leave the glass tube unless you break the tube.
At which point, even this small amount of mercury vapor is a (minor) health hazard. Certainly much more than a broken thermometer, which the mercury is liquid and if cleaned up promptly will hardly result in any (much more) hazardous vapor. Don't listen to me: pay attention to a state study that actually looked at mercury releases from a broken CFL in real-world conditions, something you never hear about....
The amount of mercury in a CFL is far less than the amount of mercury put into the atmosphere by burning coal to power an incandescent bulb.
If you're unlucky enough to have your electricity sourced from coal power plants, this is probably true. However, even if you have electricity from coal plants, if you use CFLs in places where their lifespan is significantly reduced, like in fixtures where they get too hot or in places where they are turned on and off A LOT, this benefit is significantly reduced (and even negated) unless you recycle the bulb.
Moreover, most cities don't make it easy to recycle CFLs yet. Most people undoubtedly throw them into the trash, so the mercury does get out.
Many folks call copyright (rather than copyright violations) "theft", but I'd go farther. Being a form of censorship, it is a crime against humanity.
I absolutely agreed with you regarding copyright law today. There is no reason to restrict works for nearly a century. It is a horrible abuse of power. And I also agree that even a much more limited copyright length (like the 14 years originally granted by the first U.S. act in 1790, with a possible 14 year extension) might need to be significantly reformed to deal with the new technologies today.
However, that's not the reason copyright existed originally. Look into the history. I mean the really early history, long before the Statute of Anne in 1709.
If you look at printing in the late 1400s and early 1500s, when copyrights were first granted, there was a real problem. Publishers at that time were really trying to disseminate knowledge for the first time in a big way. Before that, copying of books required actually scribes to write every copy, which was of course very expensive and time-consuming.
But around this time, many Italian scholars were rediscovering ancient works and coming up with their own works based on those models (and extending them), something commonly referred to as the Renaissance. This diffusion of knowledge was made possible in a large part by the publication of books. Translators worked hard to release editions of these ancient sources of knowledge, and publishers wanted to invest in a printing run.
But why should the translator and the publisher spend so much time and money when a month later a rival press could just take the text and republish it? The first copyrights were granted in Italian cities to promote the diffusion of knowledge: they encouraged authors and printers to take the time and make an investment to produce quality books. Yes, believe it or not, we have plenty of records stating that this was the purpose: rulers and councils in many Italian cities actually funded and promoted the culture of learning that was happening in the early Renaissance. And the terms generally lasted anywhere from a couple years to 10 years, only enough time for a publisher to sell off the stock from a first print run.
That's why copyright came into existence, and it may very well have contributed to the preservation of lots of knowledge from a time when publication was still such an expensive endeavor that high quality publications needed to be encouraged.
Granted, many evil things happened over the years since then. Rulers tried to suppress writings by only authorizing publication from certain publishers who wouldn't publish treasonous or seditious materials, etc. Those "copyrights" are hardly the same idea. But finally in 1709 in England, the Statute of Anne established a 7-year term for authors rather than publishers, and the idea was still to allow a short time to recoup the time and costs invested by someone writing a high-quality book.
Copyright is no longer like this. It is a travesty today. But until recent years, when reproduction costs became essentially nil for many types of media, it did serve a useful purpose. And in the early days, it truly helped disseminate important knowledge that arguably led to major historical advances.
Why focus on copyright extensions from 1978? That was just one in a long line of ridiculous extensions.
The original copyright act passed in 1790 just after the Constitution was ratified to create the power of copyright allowed for a term of 14 years, with a possible 14-year renewal. That was plenty. If you can't make money off of something in 28 years following its publication, you probably won't be able to. That's an entire generation who has to pay for your stuff. It also is a good chunk of the career length of an artist. The point of copyright was to encourage future works and time investment by artists, not allow them to live off one lucky creation for the rest of their days. Any revival of your work after 30 years is not going to be something you expected from your initial investment of time and money, which is what copyright law is supposed to pay for.
The correct date for the end of the public domain should be 1984. Not just "From Here to Eternity," but the music of the Beatles, etc. should be in the public domain by now....
But in the long run, a lot more people will be saved from getting screwed over because of those rules.
No they won't. Businesses today will just find other ways to screw people. To think otherwise is naive. Once businesses become so big and so impersonal that they don't care about individual people, it's inevitable.
More significantly, you're blaming the regulations for what the credit card companies did all on their own.
No, I'm blaming the regulations for doing a half-assed job at trying to control a free market. If you want to regulate credit card companies to the point that they can't make outrageous profits (i.e., actually limit their interest rates and profit by statute), you might get somewhere. But no business lobby will accept that. Instead, you put in a few stupid minor regulations that improve some people's lives, make others' worse, and lawmakers look like they've done something.
Many credit card companies used those regulations as an excuse for why they had to arbitrarily crank nearly everyone's rate as high as the law would allow, and you bought their bullshit hook, line, and sinker.
I haven't bought anything, but apparently you've bought into political propaganda that a little regulation is actually going to help anything in this case. The banks want to show record profits to satisfy the rest of the market and the investors, and they will find a way to do it... which is why they took advantage of this opportunity while they still had it.
The fact of the matter is this: companies lie. They didn't have to do it. They did it because they could
Who lied here?? Seriously. The rates are listed on the back of the credit card statement. Every customer agreed to a set of rules spelled out clearly in an agreement, which generally said their rates would be raised to ridiculous levels if the defaulted (and what constituted that), sometimes even if they defaulted on some other payment to some other entity. The fees were all laid out.
Are those fees "fair"? Of course not. But the customers took the credit cards, and they're responsible for the agreement. Any halfway intelligent person should have known that they were working with loan sharks at credit card companies, and if they didn't, they should have had it drilled into their heads in eighth-grade math.
The failure here is that people agree to things all the time that they don't read and don't understand. I know there were some shady things the credit card companies did, but for the situations affected by the regulations, they generally spelled out most fees, penalty rates, and such pretty clearly for customers.
I'm willing to blame our educational system for not giving these people the tools to evaluate financial risks. If there were specific circumstances where the policies weren't spelled out in the customer agreements, I agree that should be fixed.
But if you take money from a loan shark, you can't be surprised if he comes and breaks your kneecaps when you don't pay up. The problem, just like the problem with all the mortgages that went bust, is people don't understand financial math. Until they do, businesses will keep finding ways to take advantage of them -- simple as that.
But if you want to punish companies for agreements customers made, fine. Then we really need to regulate the credit card industry and force it to take much smaller profits. But that's not going to happen with the current lobbying environment.
What you're praising is the tomfoolery of a bunch of lawmakers trying to pretend they're doing something, while the credit card companies just find other ways to grab profits.
At this time of year it doesn't really matter in a lot of parts of the world while February is way out of holiday season and it may matter.
How, exactly? How does skipping an official day of the year not matter now? If you're talking about paying people for non-holidays, that doesn't seem to be the issue here, since they could have chosen a weekend day. Instead, they chose to delete a weekday, which forced companies to pay salaries for a day that didn't exist. If you're talking about interest rates and such, those would accrue the same way no matter what day was deleted.
I'm not sure how deleting a Friday near the end of the year somehow "doesn't matter," while deleting a Wednesday a couple months later would. No matter what day of the year you choose, if it's a weekday, most businesses are going to lose money. It's effectively an extra paid holiday for everybody. For the small amount of businesses that shut down completely between Christmas and New Year's, it might have been more convenient, but that is hardly a large percentage these days.
By the way, my suggestion of Leap Day was somewhat flippant. I don't think it matters much what day it is, but it just seems a more obvious choice, since it's so close.
This fee screws the people who can least afford it. People who pay their bill online or by phone on a one-off basis are usually the people who are struggling to pay that bill at all. By charging those folks an extra fee, Verizon basically said, "Screw the poor." To which I say, "Screw Verizon."
I think you're conflating a few things. Verizon isn't saying "screw the poor" -- they're saying, "screw those who can't maintain a budget well enough to make regular dependable payments." I'm not defending Verizon here. But if you are paying for a service that you can't guarantee you can make the payments on every month, your budget is unsustainable. That may be okay for a few months, but in the long term, you need to make changes -- whether that means changing the service or dropping it in favor of something you can afford.
(By the way, I'm speaking as someone who lived very near the poverty line for a couple years, and sometimes that meant living without various utilities or eating lots of rice and beans, but I never carried a balance on a credit card, and I never made a late payment except for one that once got crossed in the mail with another transaction.)
If Verizon wants to make this extra revenue, it will make it. And if it can't make it off of this class of customers, it will probably make it off of everyone, which means those poor people will end up paying for a significant portion anyway.
They're basically starting to act like credit card companies, and need to be dealt with in the same way that we dealt with themâ"with harsh federal regulations that punish such behavior.
Yeah, let me tell you about at least two people I know, neither of whom makes a lot of money, who were completely screwed over by those federal regulations you so prized. They had racked up debt on credit cards, but they were managing it and were paying it back responsibly. But the federal government stepped in and offered protection for the deadbeats (rich and poor) that aren't responsible and don't know how to budget.
Suddenly, my family member and my friend both experienced huge rate increases on their existing debt. (Almost everyone's rates went up to pay for the revenue the credit card companies were no longer making off of the irresponsible delinquents.) Because of that, they went from situations where they were responsibly paying back their debt every month to situations where they couldn't sustain the payments. One was lucky enough to have a family member who could bail her out; the other almost went bankrupt.
We need a safety net to protect those who end up in truly awful situations due to no fault of their own. But government intervention to protect deadbeats who can't budget will just end up screwing someone else... because ultimately, the companies will still find a way to get their profits.
Irrelevant to me. Not irrelevant to one family member and a friend who did carry (significant) balances on their cards. Their interest rates went up too, and they went from a situation where they could manage their debt and pay it back to one that wasn't really sustainable... all to save money for the folks who were truly delinquent.
When are these idiots going to realize that bullshit charges like this aren't going to fly anymore? [snip] Consumers are finally waking up, and they're tired of what basically amounts to theft.
Sort of. The thing is, most businesses bury such excess charges within general service fees anyway, if they feel like they want to make more money and are confident that enough people will pay for it. The "theft" will often happen anyway: it will just be buried in a general service fee rather than enumerated separately.
These itemized fees can go both ways. It depends on how many people want or use the itemized fee item. For example, for a long time, credit card companies were happy to charge ridiculous fees for people who were delinquent, along with other random penalty fees, as well as apply huge rate penalties, etc. Thanks to Congress last year, their ability to do this is much more limited. And thus my low fixed-rate credit cards went away, because their profits from me were no longer subsidized by the delinquents. (Not that I ever carried a balance anyway....)
For another example, people in my town seem, for the most part, to approve of the fact that the city makes over 1/3 of its budget from street-cleaning fines, because it uses an algorithm for setting street-cleaning dates that most people have trouble remembering. They could just bundle the city budget in local taxes instead, but they choose to make it off of forgetful people instead. Personally, I think it's more than a little immoral to charge more for tickets for obstructing a street cleaner than for actual hazardous parking activity (like, for example, parking too close to an intersection, and until a few years ago, parking too close to a fire hydrant), but maybe that's just me. (If there are any street cleaning fanatic defenders out there, be aware that last year due to a change in service, the street cleaners NEVER came by during the appropriate marked ticketing hours for a period of over six months... only later on the appointed days. My neighborhood suffered no unseemly build-up of detritus during this period at all.)
On the other hand, the change to an itemized fee-based structure for food on airlines seems a reasonable thing to me, particularly for short and mid-length flights where you don't necessarily need to eat a real meal. I'd prefer to have the choice of paying for a $10 crappy meal or not (and bringing my own if necessary), rather than having it bundled into the cost of my flight even if it's terrible. (I'd be even happier if the TSA would let me bring in whatever food and drink I want, rather than being forced to pay the airport premium for a lot of it.)
Anyhow, my experience is that consumers are actually rather accepting of such miscellaneous fees and fines, as long as they don't tend to apply to them very often. Companies (and governments) therefore often choose them over blanket fee increases. But even though many of them may be evil or immoral, I don't see a grand consumer effort to get rid of most of them... because a lot of people often benefit from them (as I used to benefit in my credit card rates).
I agree with what you're saying regarding the whole test.
However, regardless of the status of the whole collection of the test, as I understand it, it seems the complaint is arising over a claim of copyright on those few key items and their specific content. My question (and the one the GP was addressing) is whether one can claim copyright over something as general as a problem type.
To be clear, my analogy was referring to the specific types of problems/questions used, and to the GP's reference to "logic" used to solve/answer them. In that case, the specific "steps" of the recipe (i.e., the way to solve the problem) are implicit, rather than expressed outright.
If the text of the test was exactly the same with some numbers or something changed, they might have something. But I'm assuming the wording of these problems/questions has been altered enough that the expression is rather different. In that case, the only claim to copyright would be concerning the form of solution to the questions, which seems a rather odd thing to claim copyright over, given that the methodology of the solutions wouldn't even be contained in the text of the test.
I'd like to see the statistics on the number of extra fatalities due to extra car travel by people who are so fed up with TSA security and airline travel in general that they don't want to fly. I know that on a recent vacation, I drove the 1000 miles because I didn't feel like subjecting me and my family to airport security.
As much as I wish more people chose not to fly to protest the TSA's security measures, I doubt that number is that significant.
However, the hassle that the TSA causes and added time to travel probably does make a difference for many. Despite living very close to a major airport, it doesn't make sense for me to take a plane unless I'm going somewhere more than about 400 [highway] miles away. By the time you add up the time on public transportation to the airports, the boarding time, and the TSA "bonus" time allowance, I could usually have driven 200-300 miles. And I get to pay many times the amount I'd pay to drive, with greatly decreased flexibility in my schedule, maybe to get an hour or two of time not spent standing in a line or waiting for something to happen?
A lot of families do the math, I'm sure. It's not just the TSA but the whole airport experience. And the increased road traffic undoubtedly causes increased casualties on the road.
Given that there are roughly 40,000 traffic fatalities every year in the U.S., even if traffic rates were increased by 1%, that could increase those numbers by 400 extra fatalities per year. (Obviously, this is a very gross estimate.) Over 10 years, that would cumulatively amount to more deaths than from 9/11.
That said, I'm not sure the anti-airline sentiment has led to an increase of 1% in traffic or more, but fear of flying after 9/11 may have resulted in a significant number of road deaths, so I'm sure the effect you mention will have some significance:
http://www2.johnson.cornell.edu/thoughtleadership/feature.cfm?feature=62
If they just waited two months until February, they could have just issued calendars that skipped leap day, and few people would have even noticed (until the work week suddenly became shorter).
And they'd get to say that they were "leaping" over leap day....
I drink 2-4 cups of coffee every work day. I don't have a single cup on the weekends. I'm just finishing up a 7 day vacation and in that time I have had precisely one cup. No headaches, no jitters, nothing.
I've never been addicted to caffeine. Never had a regular habit. However, I used to be like this -- I could hang out with people on vacation for a week drinking lots of coffee for many days in a row, then stop suddenly afterward, and nothing happened. Caffeine never prevented me from sleeping, never gave me jitters....
Then, over the course of a couple years, I became more sensitive, and now I have to be very careful. A few days of drinking coffee in a row, and I'll be treated to a headache when I stop. Coffee anytime beyond about 2pm might mess with my sleep.
Everybody's different. And people change over the course of their lives. I know a lot of older people who insist on decaf after dinner but say they used to be fine with caffeine in the evening.
Why? I am now in mid 30's and I find myself getting angry and bitter over the changes happening in society. Soon, I'll become the stereotypical angry old conservative.
You do realize you have a choice, right? There are lots of bad things happening all the time, but surely there are some changes that you might think are good? It's all a matter of perspective. If you're cynical and pessimistic about the future, chances are you'll make yourself unhappy.
Given the nature of politics, power and money, the longer you are on top, the harder it is for the new generation to remove you. Do you really want a gerontocracy?
We already have one, from your description. Or, rather, we have one at some high levels of business and government. On the other hand, when older people do get thrown out of jobs or power (which all of them do, eventually), they often have a lot of trouble getting back into the game. Heck, if you're older than about 40 or so and want to make a career change or want to jump into a new position and work your way up, it's often difficult to find a business who will let you, even with at least 25 years of productive work ahead of you.
Of course, as technology increases and we find ways to combat old age, there will be social problems that arise, but we're a long way from a situation where all the old people are the only ones that matter. In fact, the trend seems to be going younger for the most influential generations and has been for quite a few years, after many years when it was trending toward older and older influence (as life expectancy increased).
But please, someone explain to me what is it that the Government really benefits from this.
They keep people afraid. They make it look like they're doing something, even if it's fighting an enemy that barely exists and which wouldn't be caught by the methods they use. Every time something does get through, they have the excuse to ratchet up the fear level: "We weren't doing enough, so we have to give the TSA more power..."
And ultimately, the rationale is that fear grants governments more power. People who are afraid will let the government do just about anything in the name of protection. Lots of people in the government thrive on power. It's cynical, but it's true. Anything that gets them more is a good thing to them.
I've seen people try. They are almost always removed from ballots on technicalities (signatures not being in cursive, or not matching a 50 year old voter registration card, its crazy to run outside the establishment)
I remember when a liberal friend of mine sent out a call for help to join in and try to find bad signatures when Ralph Nader was trying to get on a ballot in some state in a previous election. I wasn't necessarily big on Nader, but I thought this said something about my friend and about her actual belief in democracy.
I agree that we need to have some sort of policy to prevent any yahoo from getting his name on the ballot, or else we'll have thousands of names on every ballot, making them essentially unusable.
But while the entry to the ballot should require some effort, it should be relatively easy for a truly determined person and/or someone with a lot of public support to make it. Over the years, I've heard a lot of people blaming third party candidates for election losses, and so they want to keep choices off of ballots. You fix that attitude, and you'll go a long way toward allowing the possibility of actual change in this country.
There are three reasons I see for giving up on the protests:
Here's a fourth, and perhaps the most important: you need some specific demands that someone can actually do something specific about.
Lots of people may agree about the sentiment behind the movement, but a protest is never going to work unless it's a protest against something specific. Martin Luther King didn't just wander around complaining about racism in random places. Sure, the March on Washington finally developed after a critical mass of support, but for the most part he got together with marches in specific cities that had specific segregationist policies or laws. You don't boycott a company because it's "racist," you target a company that takes specific racist actions that they can reverse or remedy in some way. Then you get actual progress.
OWS complaining about rich people is like a bunch of people sitting around complaining about racism. That gets no one anywhere. You need to ask a specific entity (government, corporation, whatever) to redress some specific wrong, and then you can actually make progress.
The reason OWS has little impact is because nobody is clear on what specific measures would satisfy the protest. That's largely because pervasive social problems like OWS complains about are created by thousands of entities acting in all sorts of ways. None of them are going to change unless someone has a plan to get started. No one in the 1% is going to make changes given such amorphous demands.
If the logic is germane to the item in question, yes you can copyright logic. Think of it as music and the logic is the step changes from note to note. Changing all the notes to a different key isn't unique enough to say it is a different work.
Maybe. But is your analogy accurate? You can't, for example, copyright a chord progression -- otherwise, all 1950s and 60s bubble-gum pop would be considered the "same song."
I don't know enough about the specific test in question, but the idea that you can copyright the logic necessary to solve a problem or a specific collection of similar types of problems sounds absolutely crazy. How can anyone ever publish a new math textbook then, without someone claiming copyright infringement? Surely the methodology for solving basic algebraic equations is the same, and the types of problems used to test understanding are very similar.
This isn't like claiming copyright over a melody in a different key. A better analogy: you can't copyright a recipe (as a list of ingredients), but you can copyright a specific expression of a recipe with the more-or-less exact wording of instructions, background, etc. In this case, they're trying to copyright a recipe that isn't even expressed directly. How does that make sense?
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Any law can be misused but that does not mean that the law is irrational.
I never even mentioned the ADA directly. I never said it was irrational as a whole. In fact, as I said multiple times, I firmly believe that accommodations should be provided for people when possible and reasonable. What I did say is that people who look at the law need to be reasonable.
Since none of these "cases" have even been filed there is no way to know that they would ever succeed.
Umm, some did succeed. That doesn't mean that they would succeed in all the places that it is threatened, but do you seriously think that no one has ever sued a business for an ADA violation and succeeded?
Generalizing the thoughts of all law enforcement from the actions of two officers is not valid. The thing that "is amiss" the the two officers and not the laws.
I didn't generalize about the thoughts of all law enforcement from what I clearly identified as an "anecdote." Did you? I have more anecdotal accounts from friends if you'd like... but that wouldn't constitute evidence of what "all law enforcement" think, either.
If I were to generalize about what was going on, it wouldn't be anything about the ADA, but rather about the potential for fine revenue. Either they were overly sensitive to the plight of the handicapped (possible) or they were paying closer attention to handicapped spots because of the greater fines involved (also possible, and quite likely). Probably both.
In my city, parking too close to hydrants, too close to intersections, etc. is far too common. But no one ever gets ticketed for it, because unless it's particularly egregious, someone would have to get a tape measure and check the distance (my city long ago stopped properly painting sidewalks around such things to let you know where you can't park). Every single day on my street, directly across from my house, an illegal spot that can't exist (because it is between a fire hydrant and an intersection) is filled with a car. Those cars are never ticketed.
Until recently, the fine for street cleaning was higher than both of those other fines. I think they finally raised the fire hydrant fine, but parking too close to an intersection (and obstructing visibility) is still only about half a street cleaning fine. So who do you think they pay attention to? The city makes over 1/3 of its revenue from street cleaning fines, so that's what the law enforcement is interested in... not public safety. And yes, I will generalize about that, since it is demonstrably true. The city council folks admit that they make a great portion of their budget from street cleaning, and they know it's one of the easiest things to ticket for (because the irregular schedule for it is arcane enough that people forget about it).
Ultimately, most of these things are about money, and lawsuits and fines for handicapped violations tend to bring greater rewards than most. That I will generalize about. And that's the problem here. We should be weighing a lot of factors reasonably, but that often doesn't happen around the ADA and disabled policies.
In many cities, the right thing to do would be to get a permit and post signs 72 hours in advance to take legal parking spots out of service, by creating a "Temporary No parking zone" you can then use for your loading.
Seriously? We had about 9 people meeting up at a spot to head out on a road trip. This was just an informal thing. We had to do it at that location because some equipment was in the building there. All the cars arrived and left within 5-7 minutes. I'm not exaggerating. For that, you want us to go to the trouble of going to City Hall and putting up "No Parking" signs (which will inevitably inconvenience a lot of people that day... or inconvenience us, since when I've put up such signs when I was moving in the past, I had to call the police each time to get them to move the cars that didn't heed the temporary no parking signs)?
In any case... just taking the handicapped spot isn't legal.
I agree. But we weren't permanently parked in the spot. At best, we were "stopped" in the spot for a couple minutes.
And the penalty for doing so is likely higher than having your car parked too close to an intersection.
That is undoubtedly true. So, in your world, all we should care about are the meaningless numbers made up regarding fine values, rather than what actually matters to public safety? Cars that obstruct view by being too close to an intersection are an actual safety hazard, even if they are only parked there for a few minutes. That's why those are often no only "no parking" but also "no stopping" zones. There was no hazard created by a car parked in the handicapped space for a couple minutes, and we would have gladly relocated it if anyone came along.
The folks who need to listen are the general public, but bread and circuses numb them.
Which is why Plato noted that democracy is generally one of the worst forms of government, generally degenerating into tyranny:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato's_five_regimes
Of course, we don't actually have a democracy in the U.S. (despite the rhetoric, we've never had more than a representative republic, except occasionally on very local scales). But we do have enough of the bad characteristics of democratic systems influencing our government that Plato's critique probably applies. And one could make an argument that the U.S. has been moving its way through the progression of Plato's theory of government degeneration: "aristocracy" (learned founders, who designed a system that was based on successive levels of disconnect from democratic opinion --who could vote was limited, Senate was elected by legislatures, President was elected by a "college" of electors, etc.), then "timocracy" (expansionist phase in the U.S.), "oligarchy" (concentration of power in the super-rich in the late 19th and early 20th century), and since the various rights movements, closer to true "democracy," with ever-encroaching hints at tyranny as our rights are gradually degraded.
Note that I don't necessarily agree with Plato completely, and the mapping is not exact. But his prized form of "aristocracy" (which is more like a meritocratic government founded on smart people) has really never been tried, outside of Star Trek perhaps.
The current length of copyright is approximately a lifetime, ostensibly to ensure their works can benefit the author until their death.
Umm, no it isn't. The current length of copyright (for works published in 1978 or after) in the U.S. for individuals is 70 years AFTER THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR. For corporations, it is 120 years after creation, or 95 years after publication, whichever is shorter. (For works before 1978, the current term is 95 years.)
Most other countries also now explicitly grant copyright that extends upwards from 50 years after the death of the author. It isn't about anyone's lifetime at all, personal or corporate. It's just about greed and Mickey Mouse.
The original idea of copyright is to encourage further creation of artistic works, not to reward someone with a windfall that will support them (and their heirs) for the rest of their days. 14 years plus an optional 14 year renewal seems more than plenty to me. Any work that is still making money after 28 years is probably a "classic" that deserves to be in the public domain, and if it took more than 28 years for the work to get attention in the first place... well, let's just say that such things are rare and that rewarding an author in the circumstance is unlikely to have the intended effect of leading to more works. Either the writer left the profession long ago, or is dead, or has continued to write anyway either from success from other works or because of some other monetary support that allows that.
I'm not willing to even grant your premise about supporting an individual for a lifetime, let alone extending such logic to a corporation.
Empty parking spots all over the world that most people aren't allowed to use, which of course clutters up the rest of the parking lot. Just something to think about.
That's not interesting. Not even the slightest bit. So we over-assign handicapped spots to try and make sure that when several truly handicapped people are at the store...
I thoroughly believe that we should have spaces available for those who need it, as well as other appropriate accommodations. But I think the GP brings up a larger issue, which is when it gets to be too much -- when laws and attempts to accommodate are so important due to political correctness that they trump reason.
For example, I remember hearing a news story a year or two back about a guy who was going around some state (I think California) and suing any business that didn't follow rather restrictive and arbitrary laws about accommodations to the letter. He would just show up in a town, wander around, and a month later, half a dozen businesses would get threatened with a lawsuit. Often, because of space issues or building design issues or whatever, the businesses couldn't actually put in whatever random accommodation, so they would settle -- effectively paying shake-down money to this guy.
Is this common? I don't know. The news story mentioned one other lawyer accused of doing a similar scheme. But our collective sensitivity to the issue led to irrational laws that support such behavior.
Another personal anecdote: a few years back I was meeting up with some people to go on a short road trip outside of a building in an area with limited parking. We had three cars, one of which was parked in front of a fire hydrant too close to an intersection, one of which was parked in a loading/tow zone, and one parked in a handicapped spot. (There were two handicapped spots there, and the other was empty: in fact, these spots weren't convenient to any important buildings, so I'm not sure I had ever seen cars parked there.) All had flashers on, and we were only there for a couple minutes. It was obvious we were packing stuff in cars and were all there with the cars, and if two cars had suddenly shown up for the handicapped spots, we would have gladly moved.
A police car drives by. They stop and ask about the car in the spot. We explain the situation -- that we're loading up, there's another empty space, we'll be gone in a minute, etc. They don't care: we have to move. They say nothing about the two other cars parked illegally, including the one that was actually a traffic safety hazard.
So, we pull the car out of the space and also into an illegal parking spot too close to an intersection. That satisfies the police, and they drive away.
Again, I'm all for providing accommodations. But when law enforcement is happier with cars stopped in hazardous No Parking zones rather than take up one of two empty handicapped spaces that are never used anyway, something's a little amiss.
Care to justify why copyright should exist in the first place?
I don't think I'm obligated to, but if you go upwards on the page, you'll find my answer as to why copyright needed to exist historically:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2599374&cid=38556710
Note that I have serious problems with the copyright system today.
but copyright was only "discovered" 3 centuries ago, after the first information technology revolution swept England.
No it wasn't. It was created in Italy in the late 1400s. Go read some history instead of the anti-copyright wacko pamphlets. The most direct ancestor of the U.S. copyright system is the British system, which was reformed under the Statute of Anne in 1709 (which, by the way, was a heck of lot better than what existed before then in England). But that's not the beginning of copyright by any means.
If you favor the pragmatic argument that it incentivizes creativity, can you show evidence it works?
Yes, it's called the Renaissance. It happened long before all your English 18th-century fat cats. And it didn't so much provide incentives to authors (who generally were being paid by a patron) as it encouraged publishers' investment in distributing a wide variety of high-quality works.
Oh, and, I don't know, a lot of published work in the 19th century, after the patronage system fell apart and writers actually had to earn money on their own.
I don't deny that copyright has been used for a lot of bad things over the years. But I'm also not going to pretend, like it appears you do, that no member of the public and no creators ever benefited significantly from it.
I'm getting really tired of hearing rants by people about history who don't bother to know anything about it.
They contain mercury vapor, but it doesn't leave the glass tube unless you break the tube.
At which point, even this small amount of mercury vapor is a (minor) health hazard. Certainly much more than a broken thermometer, which the mercury is liquid and if cleaned up promptly will hardly result in any (much more) hazardous vapor. Don't listen to me: pay attention to a state study that actually looked at mercury releases from a broken CFL in real-world conditions, something you never hear about....
http://www.maine.gov/dep/homeowner/cflreport.html
The amount of mercury in a CFL is far less than the amount of mercury put into the atmosphere by burning coal to power an incandescent bulb.
If you're unlucky enough to have your electricity sourced from coal power plants, this is probably true. However, even if you have electricity from coal plants, if you use CFLs in places where their lifespan is significantly reduced, like in fixtures where they get too hot or in places where they are turned on and off A LOT, this benefit is significantly reduced (and even negated) unless you recycle the bulb.
Moreover, most cities don't make it easy to recycle CFLs yet. Most people undoubtedly throw them into the trash, so the mercury does get out.
Many folks call copyright (rather than copyright violations) "theft", but I'd go farther. Being a form of censorship, it is a crime against humanity.
I absolutely agreed with you regarding copyright law today. There is no reason to restrict works for nearly a century. It is a horrible abuse of power. And I also agree that even a much more limited copyright length (like the 14 years originally granted by the first U.S. act in 1790, with a possible 14 year extension) might need to be significantly reformed to deal with the new technologies today.
However, that's not the reason copyright existed originally. Look into the history. I mean the really early history, long before the Statute of Anne in 1709.
If you look at printing in the late 1400s and early 1500s, when copyrights were first granted, there was a real problem. Publishers at that time were really trying to disseminate knowledge for the first time in a big way. Before that, copying of books required actually scribes to write every copy, which was of course very expensive and time-consuming.
But around this time, many Italian scholars were rediscovering ancient works and coming up with their own works based on those models (and extending them), something commonly referred to as the Renaissance. This diffusion of knowledge was made possible in a large part by the publication of books. Translators worked hard to release editions of these ancient sources of knowledge, and publishers wanted to invest in a printing run.
But why should the translator and the publisher spend so much time and money when a month later a rival press could just take the text and republish it? The first copyrights were granted in Italian cities to promote the diffusion of knowledge: they encouraged authors and printers to take the time and make an investment to produce quality books. Yes, believe it or not, we have plenty of records stating that this was the purpose: rulers and councils in many Italian cities actually funded and promoted the culture of learning that was happening in the early Renaissance. And the terms generally lasted anywhere from a couple years to 10 years, only enough time for a publisher to sell off the stock from a first print run.
That's why copyright came into existence, and it may very well have contributed to the preservation of lots of knowledge from a time when publication was still such an expensive endeavor that high quality publications needed to be encouraged.
Granted, many evil things happened over the years since then. Rulers tried to suppress writings by only authorizing publication from certain publishers who wouldn't publish treasonous or seditious materials, etc. Those "copyrights" are hardly the same idea. But finally in 1709 in England, the Statute of Anne established a 7-year term for authors rather than publishers, and the idea was still to allow a short time to recoup the time and costs invested by someone writing a high-quality book.
Copyright is no longer like this. It is a travesty today. But until recent years, when reproduction costs became essentially nil for many types of media, it did serve a useful purpose. And in the early days, it truly helped disseminate important knowledge that arguably led to major historical advances.
The original copyright act passed in 1790 just after the Constitution was ratified to create the power of copyright allowed for a term of 14 years, with a possible 14-year renewal. That was plenty. If you can't make money off of something in 28 years following its publication, you probably won't be able to. That's an entire generation who has to pay for your stuff. It also is a good chunk of the career length of an artist. The point of copyright was to encourage future works and time investment by artists, not allow them to live off one lucky creation for the rest of their days. Any revival of your work after 30 years is not going to be something you expected from your initial investment of time and money, which is what copyright law is supposed to pay for.
The correct date for the end of the public domain should be 1984. Not just "From Here to Eternity," but the music of the Beatles, etc. should be in the public domain by now....
But in the long run, a lot more people will be saved from getting screwed over because of those rules.
No they won't. Businesses today will just find other ways to screw people. To think otherwise is naive. Once businesses become so big and so impersonal that they don't care about individual people, it's inevitable.
More significantly, you're blaming the regulations for what the credit card companies did all on their own.
No, I'm blaming the regulations for doing a half-assed job at trying to control a free market. If you want to regulate credit card companies to the point that they can't make outrageous profits (i.e., actually limit their interest rates and profit by statute), you might get somewhere. But no business lobby will accept that. Instead, you put in a few stupid minor regulations that improve some people's lives, make others' worse, and lawmakers look like they've done something.
Many credit card companies used those regulations as an excuse for why they had to arbitrarily crank nearly everyone's rate as high as the law would allow, and you bought their bullshit hook, line, and sinker.
I haven't bought anything, but apparently you've bought into political propaganda that a little regulation is actually going to help anything in this case. The banks want to show record profits to satisfy the rest of the market and the investors, and they will find a way to do it... which is why they took advantage of this opportunity while they still had it.
The fact of the matter is this: companies lie. They didn't have to do it. They did it because they could
Who lied here?? Seriously. The rates are listed on the back of the credit card statement. Every customer agreed to a set of rules spelled out clearly in an agreement, which generally said their rates would be raised to ridiculous levels if the defaulted (and what constituted that), sometimes even if they defaulted on some other payment to some other entity. The fees were all laid out.
Are those fees "fair"? Of course not. But the customers took the credit cards, and they're responsible for the agreement. Any halfway intelligent person should have known that they were working with loan sharks at credit card companies, and if they didn't, they should have had it drilled into their heads in eighth-grade math.
The failure here is that people agree to things all the time that they don't read and don't understand. I know there were some shady things the credit card companies did, but for the situations affected by the regulations, they generally spelled out most fees, penalty rates, and such pretty clearly for customers.
I'm willing to blame our educational system for not giving these people the tools to evaluate financial risks. If there were specific circumstances where the policies weren't spelled out in the customer agreements, I agree that should be fixed.
But if you take money from a loan shark, you can't be surprised if he comes and breaks your kneecaps when you don't pay up. The problem, just like the problem with all the mortgages that went bust, is people don't understand financial math. Until they do, businesses will keep finding ways to take advantage of them -- simple as that.
But if you want to punish companies for agreements customers made, fine. Then we really need to regulate the credit card industry and force it to take much smaller profits. But that's not going to happen with the current lobbying environment.
What you're praising is the tomfoolery of a bunch of lawmakers trying to pretend they're doing something, while the credit card companies just find other ways to grab profits.
At this time of year it doesn't really matter in a lot of parts of the world while February is way out of holiday season and it may matter.
How, exactly? How does skipping an official day of the year not matter now? If you're talking about paying people for non-holidays, that doesn't seem to be the issue here, since they could have chosen a weekend day. Instead, they chose to delete a weekday, which forced companies to pay salaries for a day that didn't exist. If you're talking about interest rates and such, those would accrue the same way no matter what day was deleted.
I'm not sure how deleting a Friday near the end of the year somehow "doesn't matter," while deleting a Wednesday a couple months later would. No matter what day of the year you choose, if it's a weekday, most businesses are going to lose money. It's effectively an extra paid holiday for everybody. For the small amount of businesses that shut down completely between Christmas and New Year's, it might have been more convenient, but that is hardly a large percentage these days.
By the way, my suggestion of Leap Day was somewhat flippant. I don't think it matters much what day it is, but it just seems a more obvious choice, since it's so close.
This fee screws the people who can least afford it. People who pay their bill online or by phone on a one-off basis are usually the people who are struggling to pay that bill at all. By charging those folks an extra fee, Verizon basically said, "Screw the poor." To which I say, "Screw Verizon."
I think you're conflating a few things. Verizon isn't saying "screw the poor" -- they're saying, "screw those who can't maintain a budget well enough to make regular dependable payments." I'm not defending Verizon here. But if you are paying for a service that you can't guarantee you can make the payments on every month, your budget is unsustainable. That may be okay for a few months, but in the long term, you need to make changes -- whether that means changing the service or dropping it in favor of something you can afford.
(By the way, I'm speaking as someone who lived very near the poverty line for a couple years, and sometimes that meant living without various utilities or eating lots of rice and beans, but I never carried a balance on a credit card, and I never made a late payment except for one that once got crossed in the mail with another transaction.)
If Verizon wants to make this extra revenue, it will make it. And if it can't make it off of this class of customers, it will probably make it off of everyone, which means those poor people will end up paying for a significant portion anyway.
They're basically starting to act like credit card companies, and need to be dealt with in the same way that we dealt with themâ"with harsh federal regulations that punish such behavior.
Yeah, let me tell you about at least two people I know, neither of whom makes a lot of money, who were completely screwed over by those federal regulations you so prized. They had racked up debt on credit cards, but they were managing it and were paying it back responsibly. But the federal government stepped in and offered protection for the deadbeats (rich and poor) that aren't responsible and don't know how to budget.
Suddenly, my family member and my friend both experienced huge rate increases on their existing debt. (Almost everyone's rates went up to pay for the revenue the credit card companies were no longer making off of the irresponsible delinquents.) Because of that, they went from situations where they were responsibly paying back their debt every month to situations where they couldn't sustain the payments. One was lucky enough to have a family member who could bail her out; the other almost went bankrupt.
We need a safety net to protect those who end up in truly awful situations due to no fault of their own. But government intervention to protect deadbeats who can't budget will just end up screwing someone else... because ultimately, the companies will still find a way to get their profits.
Irrelevant to me. Not irrelevant to one family member and a friend who did carry (significant) balances on their cards. Their interest rates went up too, and they went from a situation where they could manage their debt and pay it back to one that wasn't really sustainable... all to save money for the folks who were truly delinquent.
When are these idiots going to realize that bullshit charges like this aren't going to fly anymore? [snip] Consumers are finally waking up, and they're tired of what basically amounts to theft.
Sort of. The thing is, most businesses bury such excess charges within general service fees anyway, if they feel like they want to make more money and are confident that enough people will pay for it. The "theft" will often happen anyway: it will just be buried in a general service fee rather than enumerated separately.
These itemized fees can go both ways. It depends on how many people want or use the itemized fee item. For example, for a long time, credit card companies were happy to charge ridiculous fees for people who were delinquent, along with other random penalty fees, as well as apply huge rate penalties, etc. Thanks to Congress last year, their ability to do this is much more limited. And thus my low fixed-rate credit cards went away, because their profits from me were no longer subsidized by the delinquents. (Not that I ever carried a balance anyway....)
For another example, people in my town seem, for the most part, to approve of the fact that the city makes over 1/3 of its budget from street-cleaning fines, because it uses an algorithm for setting street-cleaning dates that most people have trouble remembering. They could just bundle the city budget in local taxes instead, but they choose to make it off of forgetful people instead. Personally, I think it's more than a little immoral to charge more for tickets for obstructing a street cleaner than for actual hazardous parking activity (like, for example, parking too close to an intersection, and until a few years ago, parking too close to a fire hydrant), but maybe that's just me. (If there are any street cleaning fanatic defenders out there, be aware that last year due to a change in service, the street cleaners NEVER came by during the appropriate marked ticketing hours for a period of over six months... only later on the appointed days. My neighborhood suffered no unseemly build-up of detritus during this period at all.)
On the other hand, the change to an itemized fee-based structure for food on airlines seems a reasonable thing to me, particularly for short and mid-length flights where you don't necessarily need to eat a real meal. I'd prefer to have the choice of paying for a $10 crappy meal or not (and bringing my own if necessary), rather than having it bundled into the cost of my flight even if it's terrible. (I'd be even happier if the TSA would let me bring in whatever food and drink I want, rather than being forced to pay the airport premium for a lot of it.)
Anyhow, my experience is that consumers are actually rather accepting of such miscellaneous fees and fines, as long as they don't tend to apply to them very often. Companies (and governments) therefore often choose them over blanket fee increases. But even though many of them may be evil or immoral, I don't see a grand consumer effort to get rid of most of them... because a lot of people often benefit from them (as I used to benefit in my credit card rates).
I agree with what you're saying regarding the whole test.
However, regardless of the status of the whole collection of the test, as I understand it, it seems the complaint is arising over a claim of copyright on those few key items and their specific content. My question (and the one the GP was addressing) is whether one can claim copyright over something as general as a problem type.
To be clear, my analogy was referring to the specific types of problems/questions used, and to the GP's reference to "logic" used to solve/answer them. In that case, the specific "steps" of the recipe (i.e., the way to solve the problem) are implicit, rather than expressed outright.
If the text of the test was exactly the same with some numbers or something changed, they might have something. But I'm assuming the wording of these problems/questions has been altered enough that the expression is rather different. In that case, the only claim to copyright would be concerning the form of solution to the questions, which seems a rather odd thing to claim copyright over, given that the methodology of the solutions wouldn't even be contained in the text of the test.
I'd like to see the statistics on the number of extra fatalities due to extra car travel by people who are so fed up with TSA security and airline travel in general that they don't want to fly. I know that on a recent vacation, I drove the 1000 miles because I didn't feel like subjecting me and my family to airport security.
As much as I wish more people chose not to fly to protest the TSA's security measures, I doubt that number is that significant.
However, the hassle that the TSA causes and added time to travel probably does make a difference for many. Despite living very close to a major airport, it doesn't make sense for me to take a plane unless I'm going somewhere more than about 400 [highway] miles away. By the time you add up the time on public transportation to the airports, the boarding time, and the TSA "bonus" time allowance, I could usually have driven 200-300 miles. And I get to pay many times the amount I'd pay to drive, with greatly decreased flexibility in my schedule, maybe to get an hour or two of time not spent standing in a line or waiting for something to happen?
A lot of families do the math, I'm sure. It's not just the TSA but the whole airport experience. And the increased road traffic undoubtedly causes increased casualties on the road.
Given that there are roughly 40,000 traffic fatalities every year in the U.S., even if traffic rates were increased by 1%, that could increase those numbers by 400 extra fatalities per year. (Obviously, this is a very gross estimate.) Over 10 years, that would cumulatively amount to more deaths than from 9/11.
That said, I'm not sure the anti-airline sentiment has led to an increase of 1% in traffic or more, but fear of flying after 9/11 may have resulted in a significant number of road deaths, so I'm sure the effect you mention will have some significance: http://www2.johnson.cornell.edu/thoughtleadership/feature.cfm?feature=62
but I got there quickly and safely before the TSA and W Bush
Why just W? What about Obama (under whom the enhanced scanners were introduced), or all the Congressmen who argued for it too?
I'm no Bush fan, but most of the current administration, and most of Congress (including most Democrats) are culpable in this as well.
And they'd get to say that they were "leaping" over leap day....
Then you're good. And when you do get around to starting back up, it's SUPER AWESOME.
Agreed. I've never been addicted to caffeine, and thus I occasionally get the benefits when I want. As studies have shown, addicts actually live their non-caffeinated lives below their normal alertness level and only get up to their non-addiction baseline when taking caffeine. Non-addicts actually get a net benefit, but addicts don't: http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/06/02/219229/caffeine-addicts-get-no-additional-perk-only-a-return-to-baseline
I drink 2-4 cups of coffee every work day. I don't have a single cup on the weekends. I'm just finishing up a 7 day vacation and in that time I have had precisely one cup. No headaches, no jitters, nothing.
I've never been addicted to caffeine. Never had a regular habit. However, I used to be like this -- I could hang out with people on vacation for a week drinking lots of coffee for many days in a row, then stop suddenly afterward, and nothing happened. Caffeine never prevented me from sleeping, never gave me jitters....
Then, over the course of a couple years, I became more sensitive, and now I have to be very careful. A few days of drinking coffee in a row, and I'll be treated to a headache when I stop. Coffee anytime beyond about 2pm might mess with my sleep.
Everybody's different. And people change over the course of their lives. I know a lot of older people who insist on decaf after dinner but say they used to be fine with caffeine in the evening.
Why? I am now in mid 30's and I find myself getting angry and bitter over the changes happening in society. Soon, I'll become the stereotypical angry old conservative.
You do realize you have a choice, right? There are lots of bad things happening all the time, but surely there are some changes that you might think are good? It's all a matter of perspective. If you're cynical and pessimistic about the future, chances are you'll make yourself unhappy.
Given the nature of politics, power and money, the longer you are on top, the harder it is for the new generation to remove you. Do you really want a gerontocracy?
We already have one, from your description. Or, rather, we have one at some high levels of business and government. On the other hand, when older people do get thrown out of jobs or power (which all of them do, eventually), they often have a lot of trouble getting back into the game. Heck, if you're older than about 40 or so and want to make a career change or want to jump into a new position and work your way up, it's often difficult to find a business who will let you, even with at least 25 years of productive work ahead of you.
Of course, as technology increases and we find ways to combat old age, there will be social problems that arise, but we're a long way from a situation where all the old people are the only ones that matter. In fact, the trend seems to be going younger for the most influential generations and has been for quite a few years, after many years when it was trending toward older and older influence (as life expectancy increased).
But please, someone explain to me what is it that the Government really benefits from this.
They keep people afraid. They make it look like they're doing something, even if it's fighting an enemy that barely exists and which wouldn't be caught by the methods they use. Every time something does get through, they have the excuse to ratchet up the fear level: "We weren't doing enough, so we have to give the TSA more power..."
And ultimately, the rationale is that fear grants governments more power. People who are afraid will let the government do just about anything in the name of protection. Lots of people in the government thrive on power. It's cynical, but it's true. Anything that gets them more is a good thing to them.
I've seen people try. They are almost always removed from ballots on technicalities (signatures not being in cursive, or not matching a 50 year old voter registration card, its crazy to run outside the establishment)
I remember when a liberal friend of mine sent out a call for help to join in and try to find bad signatures when Ralph Nader was trying to get on a ballot in some state in a previous election. I wasn't necessarily big on Nader, but I thought this said something about my friend and about her actual belief in democracy.
I agree that we need to have some sort of policy to prevent any yahoo from getting his name on the ballot, or else we'll have thousands of names on every ballot, making them essentially unusable.
But while the entry to the ballot should require some effort, it should be relatively easy for a truly determined person and/or someone with a lot of public support to make it. Over the years, I've heard a lot of people blaming third party candidates for election losses, and so they want to keep choices off of ballots. You fix that attitude, and you'll go a long way toward allowing the possibility of actual change in this country.
There are three reasons I see for giving up on the protests:
Here's a fourth, and perhaps the most important: you need some specific demands that someone can actually do something specific about.
Lots of people may agree about the sentiment behind the movement, but a protest is never going to work unless it's a protest against something specific. Martin Luther King didn't just wander around complaining about racism in random places. Sure, the March on Washington finally developed after a critical mass of support, but for the most part he got together with marches in specific cities that had specific segregationist policies or laws. You don't boycott a company because it's "racist," you target a company that takes specific racist actions that they can reverse or remedy in some way. Then you get actual progress.
OWS complaining about rich people is like a bunch of people sitting around complaining about racism. That gets no one anywhere. You need to ask a specific entity (government, corporation, whatever) to redress some specific wrong, and then you can actually make progress.
The reason OWS has little impact is because nobody is clear on what specific measures would satisfy the protest. That's largely because pervasive social problems like OWS complains about are created by thousands of entities acting in all sorts of ways. None of them are going to change unless someone has a plan to get started. No one in the 1% is going to make changes given such amorphous demands.
If the logic is germane to the item in question, yes you can copyright logic. Think of it as music and the logic is the step changes from note to note. Changing all the notes to a different key isn't unique enough to say it is a different work.
Maybe. But is your analogy accurate? You can't, for example, copyright a chord progression -- otherwise, all 1950s and 60s bubble-gum pop would be considered the "same song."
I don't know enough about the specific test in question, but the idea that you can copyright the logic necessary to solve a problem or a specific collection of similar types of problems sounds absolutely crazy. How can anyone ever publish a new math textbook then, without someone claiming copyright infringement? Surely the methodology for solving basic algebraic equations is the same, and the types of problems used to test understanding are very similar.
This isn't like claiming copyright over a melody in a different key. A better analogy: you can't copyright a recipe (as a list of ingredients), but you can copyright a specific expression of a recipe with the more-or-less exact wording of instructions, background, etc. In this case, they're trying to copyright a recipe that isn't even expressed directly. How does that make sense?