1. Do enough bad things that people in your country start adding their word for "crook" to searches with your trademark 2. Sue Google. And Bing and Yahoo and Yelp and so on! 3. Profit! (through the lawsuits) 4. Profit more! (because your crappy customer service no longer hurts you now that all review aggregators are forced to hide it)
The same thing Obama did about Gitmo. Issue an executive order, get stonewalled by Congress, realize that being president isn't like being king, and give up.
Because the private companies aren't picking up the slack. If you want cutting edge research into how to give old men erections, then the private industry is all over it. If you want research the better the state of humanity, but which won't put much money into the 1%'s pockets, then you damn well better hope the government is funding research, because no private industry would touch that with a ten foot pole.
Are you kidding me? Ir's always easier to reverse engineer something than it is to make it in the first place, especially in things like pharmaceuticals and mechanical designs. But that's not even important, because companies routinely outsource manufacturing. That would become corporate suicide in a world with no IP. Every company would need to produce everything itself. You couldn't have fabless semiconductor companies... instead every company would need to build its own multibillion dollar fab.
The abolishment of IP would be the death of engineering.
At first perhaps, but if people suddenly can't find any news on Google, they'll switch search engines pretty darn quick. The informed people will know what's happening and go to another engine, and the uninformed will be told by the evening news, over and over, "Google doesn't have the news anymore! Go to [alternate search engine.com] from now on!"
This is moronic, not insightful. Any price higher than the cost of distribution is too high? By that logic, no author or movie maker should ever earn a dime off their creations!
And claiming that artists would make "MUCH more money" if movies cost pennies? Are you kidding me? Just to earn a living wage, they'd need to sell millions of copies every year. To put that in perspective, the Humble Bundles allow people to buy for cents, and they only sell a few hundred thousand copies.
People like this make a mockery of anyone who wants sensible copyright reform. They just want to have everything they want, for free, and rely on magical thinking to believe that that'll be A-OK with the content creators.
A pack of cigarettes back then cost ~$1.25, and gas was around a dollar a gallon. So it was quite possible, in 1997, to fill your tank and buy a pack of cigarettes for an amount of money equivalent to $15 today.
(Reason being that cigarettes and gasoline have both seen their prices rise at far more than the average rate of inflation.)
That seems reasonable to an extent, but I suspect that companies could come up with a decent estimate of what their movie is worth if they tried. Compare movies to video games. Both have lots of up front costs, low distribution costs, and will generate most of their income within the first month after release. But with video games, companies price new releases anywhere from $15 for smaller titles that don't have a major studio or big name franchise to drive sales, up to $60 for the latest installment of a major series (e.g. Call of Duty, Elder Scrolls, etc.).
Surely they could have guessed that The Darkest Hour, a Christmas release horror movie (??) by a relatively unknown director wouldn't sell as well as Mission Impossible 4?
I have a portable radio/flashlight from LL Bean that has a little handcrank which can be used to either charge the device itself or any other device connected via USB. Twenty minutes of turning the crank takes my phone from dead to ~30% charge, is not at all tiring, and has the added advantage of working at night. I think that would be a better solution for third world phone charging than solar cells. Maybe even put the crank right on the phone, though that might make it too clunky.
Like so many before you, you're making the mistake of thinking that prices are determined by the manufacturer's costs. They're not. They're determined by what consumers are willing to pay. As you decrease your asking price, you'll get more and more people who are willing to pay, but you'll lose out on money from those who would have been willing to pay even more.
Here's an oversimplified example:
Let's say no one is willing to buy your widget for $100 At $99, 100 people will buy it. At $98, 200 people will buy it. At so on, down to 9900 people buying it for $1. In this case, it is trivial to prove that the optimal price is $50, at which 5000 people buy it, for a total revenue of $250k.
Using the same logic to show a comparison between a blockbuster and a bomb: Let's say the blockbuster and bomb both cost $10 million to make and $1 per viewer to distribute. The blockbuster will draw one million people for every dollar below $20 on the ticket price. No one's particularly eager to see the bomb, and even those that are will wait for it on DVD if the ticket costs more than $15. So let's say the bomb will draw only 200k people for every dollar below $15 on the ticket price.
The blockbuster's optimal price comes out to $10.50 at which it draws 9.5 million people, for a revenue of $99.75 million, with costs of $10M (fixed) + $9.5M (distribution), resulting in a total profit of $80.25M.
The bomb's optimal price turns out to be $8, at which it draws 1.4 million people, for a revenue of $11.2 million, minus $11.4 million in total costs, ending with a small ($200k) loss.
But if the bomb tries to charge the same as the blockbuster ($10.50), it only draws 900k people, for a revenue of $9.45M, minus $10.9M in costs, ending with a much larger loss of $1.45M.
In real life the relationship between price and people willing to pay isn't linear, but it is still monotonic (i.e. if you get a million people willing to spend $10 on a movie, you won't have two million wanting to see it for $15), so the same logic applies just with harder math.
Philosophy is of little importance when the policies libertarians support would have the opposite effect. Libertarians are always pushing for smaller government and fewer regulations, which would have the effect of making large, wealthy businesses even more powerful.
But they're not replaced all at once, which is an important difference. If our conscious selves are indeed complex patterns in our brains, then those patterns can survive having parts changed out, a few molecules at a time. But if you destroy the brain altogether, the pattern stops. The fact that an identical copy of the pattern was created ahead of time makes no difference. Your pattern has ended.
For an analogy, if I'm running a program on my computer, the states of various nodes in the CPU are constantly changing. But if I power cycle the computer, that instance of the program is over, because it can't survive having everything blanked at once. Having a copy of the same program running elsewhere doesn't change anything.
Look mods, I'm going to make if very simple for you, since I don't want to see this lie spreading any further.
Here is a link to roman_mir pointing to the specific text that concerns him.
Here is the text, copied directly from his post, emphasis his:
SEC. 1031. DEFINITION OF INDIVIDUAL DETAINED AT GUANTANAMO.
In this subtitle, the term `individual detained at Guantanamo' means any individual who is located at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on or after March 7, 2011, who--
(1) is not a citizen of the United States or a member of the Armed Forces of the United States; and
(2) is in the custody or under the effective control of the Department of Defense.
He is concerned that this section was seemingly removed. He claims that it was removed at Obama's insistence and that it allows American citizens to be detained indefinitely.
Here is the link to the full text of what was passed.
Here is the text of the definition that he thought was removed. It wasn't removed, only relocated and modified slightly. Originally the term "individual detained at Guantanamo" was defined in its own section. In the final version of the bill, they moved the definition to a subsection of the section talking about the detainees. You can check the text of the bill inside the link if you don't believe me.
SEC. 1028. REQUIREMENTS FOR CERTIFICATIONS RELATING TO THE TRANSFER OF DETAINEES AT UNITED STATES NAVAL STATION, GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA, TO FOREIGN COUNTRIES AND OTHER FOREIGN ENTITIES.
(e) Definitions- In this section:
(2) The term `individual detained at Guantanamo' means any individual located at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as of October 1, 2009, who--
(A) is not a citizen of the United States or a member of the Armed Forces of the United States; and
(B) is--
(i) in the custody or under the control of the Department of Defense; or
(ii) otherwise under detention at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
So it is established that roman_mir is incorrect in thinking that this section was removed. It follows that he is also incorrect in thinking that Obama forced Congress to remove the section, since the section hasn't been removed.
Finally, it is worth noting that this is merely a definition of what the term "individual detained at Guantanamo" means, and does not authorize any actual detainment. Such definitions are common in legal writing. So even if roman_mir had been right about the definition being removed, it would not have had the implications he is claiming.
Hopefully this makes it clear to moderators and readers alike that roman_mir is completely off base in his statements. In an ideal world, moderators would check the facts for themselves before handing out informative mods, but since that's not happening here, I'll try to make it all concise enough that even the laziest mod can see the truth of the situation.
Your rebuttal comes down to your lack of reading. You saw that the part where they define a Gitmo detainee was "removed" and panicked, but they actually just moved that definition to Section 1028(e)(2).
Not that that part even matters, since it's just defining what they mean when they say "individual detained at Guantanamo", and does not give any power to detain anyone. It's simply a definition. Legal writing is full of such things.
That's the section you're scared of? That section has nothing to do with what you claim. It's just setting a definition for what constitutes a detainee, for use in future sections. And it's not even removed from the final version!
They just moved it!! It's now located in Section 1028(e)(2). Look for yourself!
You can have a philosophy on specific issues, e.g. "Having a clean, minimalist main page is central to our design philosophy". An overarching philosophy gets applied to everything, from the webpage to the cafeteria.
The sum total of Tea Party protests covered a span of time equivalent to maybe one week worth of Occupy.
Are you really going to try to deny that crimes occur wherever people are? Please, tell me where this utopia you reside in is, so that I can move there myself.
You are a lunatic, as I said in the other thread. The thing you are claiming Obama forced them to include is not in the bill at all. Here's the post again, since I don't feel like retyping it all. The full text of the bill is linked, and I provide references to the specific sections of interest. Moderators are encouraged to read the section for themselves before judging the truthfulness of what this paranoid guy is claiming.
Because then the Republicans would run ads about how he vetoed a bill to provide health care to wounded soldiers, or body armor to troops on the front lines. And those ads would be technically truthful, since all those things are part of the bill. And the drooling masses that make up the majority of the American electorate would see those ads and be convinced, because most people are too lazy to do research.
"The FBI, CIA, Federal Marshals, military, and all the other executive apparatus of the nation report to secretaries HE appoints (with fairly rubber-stamp Senate approval),"
That approval has been anything but rubber stamp these days. The GOP has used various procedural tricks to block nearly half of Obama's appointments, forcing several key agencies to be left leaderless for years.
"The Congress can't order Obama to keep Guantanamo open. But he could close it tomorrow if he wished."
Wrong. They added language to the NDAA stating that absolutely no money can be spent moving the detainees from Gitmo to other places. Since the prison can't close while there are people there, the prison can never close, and there's nothing Obama can do about it. Sure, he could try to veto the NDAA, but that would mean that the entire United States military would be forced to shut down. Can you imagine the campaign ads? The Democratic Senators sure can, which is why they would override his veto.
The problem is there are lots of crazy people in the world, and we don't have enough time on this planet to refute every bit of nonsense they spew. Fallacies like the argument from authority or the ad hominem make for bad logical proofs, but they're necessary in day to day life.
I can't prove a square has five corners by insulting your mother, but if the wino on the street corner tells me the end is nigh, I'm not going to bother listening to his arguments. You shouldn't believe me if I say 2+2=5 just because I wave around a diploma, but every time you cross a bridge, you're trusting in the authority of those who built and checked it without bothering to check their work.
If Stallman comes across as a nutjob, no one will listen to him. And why should they? There are tons of nutjobs in the media, and you'd die of old age before you could listen to and analyze everything they had to say.
Look, crazy person. The law does not contain the very thing that you are claiming that Obama forced them to include. If I say that Obama forced the Sun to turn purple, and you look at the sky and see it is yellow, would you believe me?
Part A lets the military detain suspected terrorists if they: A) Are a member of Al Qaeda or associated group that works in coordination with Al Qaeda AND B) Has planned or participated in an attack or attempted attack against the US or its allies
This section was modified to allow non-Al Qaeda terrorists to be detained so long as the current president writes a letter to Congress explaining why that person is dangerous.
READ THIS!!! READ THIS!!! However, it is still restrained by Part B which prevents the entire section from being applied to US citizens. READ THIS!!! READ THIS!!!
Did you read it? Check the law yourself. It is right there, in plain English, black and white, iron clad. This law does not apply to US citizens.
Now go take your meds, and stop spreading lies. I shouldn't need to do your homework for you.
The Tea Parties carried guns, waved signs about "watering the tree of liberty with blood", and cheered for "second amendment solutions". To claim that they're nonviolent is absurd.
By contrast, crimes were committed at Occupy sites. Guess what? Crimes are committed wherever people are. You can't have a big crowd in one place for a long time and expect it to be crime free.
In one case, violent imagery is a part of who they are. In the other case, violent crimes happened where the protests were occurring, but had nothing to do with the protesters' message. It's a pretty important distinction, and one that many (biased) people like to overlook.
The reason Gitmo is still there is because the Republicans blocked his efforts to close it. He's not a dictator and he can't simply rule by fiat -- even though his critics like to accuse him of doing so.
The Republican game plan for the past several years has been to use the power of Congress to keep him from doing what he wanted to do, and then accuse him of lying when those things didn't get done. The fact that so many people are stupid enough to fall for it is astounding.
Slashdot Mirror
Better plan:
1. Do enough bad things that people in your country start adding their word for "crook" to searches with your trademark
2. Sue Google. And Bing and Yahoo and Yelp and so on!
3. Profit! (through the lawsuits)
4. Profit more! (because your crappy customer service no longer hurts you now that all review aggregators are forced to hide it)
The same thing Obama did about Gitmo. Issue an executive order, get stonewalled by Congress, realize that being president isn't like being king, and give up.
Because the private companies aren't picking up the slack. If you want cutting edge research into how to give old men erections, then the private industry is all over it. If you want research the better the state of humanity, but which won't put much money into the 1%'s pockets, then you damn well better hope the government is funding research, because no private industry would touch that with a ten foot pole.
Are you kidding me? Ir's always easier to reverse engineer something than it is to make it in the first place, especially in things like pharmaceuticals and mechanical designs. But that's not even important, because companies routinely outsource manufacturing. That would become corporate suicide in a world with no IP. Every company would need to produce everything itself. You couldn't have fabless semiconductor companies... instead every company would need to build its own multibillion dollar fab.
The abolishment of IP would be the death of engineering.
At first perhaps, but if people suddenly can't find any news on Google, they'll switch search engines pretty darn quick. The informed people will know what's happening and go to another engine, and the uninformed will be told by the evening news, over and over, "Google doesn't have the news anymore! Go to [alternate search engine.com] from now on!"
This is moronic, not insightful. Any price higher than the cost of distribution is too high? By that logic, no author or movie maker should ever earn a dime off their creations!
And claiming that artists would make "MUCH more money" if movies cost pennies? Are you kidding me? Just to earn a living wage, they'd need to sell millions of copies every year. To put that in perspective, the Humble Bundles allow people to buy for cents, and they only sell a few hundred thousand copies.
People like this make a mockery of anyone who wants sensible copyright reform. They just want to have everything they want, for free, and rely on magical thinking to believe that that'll be A-OK with the content creators.
I left that out of the oversimplified example (hence the name), but did include production cost per unit in the following examples.
$15 dollars today = $10.72 when DNF development began.
A pack of cigarettes back then cost ~$1.25, and gas was around a dollar a gallon. So it was quite possible, in 1997, to fill your tank and buy a pack of cigarettes for an amount of money equivalent to $15 today.
(Reason being that cigarettes and gasoline have both seen their prices rise at far more than the average rate of inflation.)
That seems reasonable to an extent, but I suspect that companies could come up with a decent estimate of what their movie is worth if they tried. Compare movies to video games. Both have lots of up front costs, low distribution costs, and will generate most of their income within the first month after release. But with video games, companies price new releases anywhere from $15 for smaller titles that don't have a major studio or big name franchise to drive sales, up to $60 for the latest installment of a major series (e.g. Call of Duty, Elder Scrolls, etc.).
Surely they could have guessed that The Darkest Hour, a Christmas release horror movie (??) by a relatively unknown director wouldn't sell as well as Mission Impossible 4?
I have a portable radio/flashlight from LL Bean that has a little handcrank which can be used to either charge the device itself or any other device connected via USB. Twenty minutes of turning the crank takes my phone from dead to ~30% charge, is not at all tiring, and has the added advantage of working at night. I think that would be a better solution for third world phone charging than solar cells. Maybe even put the crank right on the phone, though that might make it too clunky.
Like so many before you, you're making the mistake of thinking that prices are determined by the manufacturer's costs. They're not. They're determined by what consumers are willing to pay. As you decrease your asking price, you'll get more and more people who are willing to pay, but you'll lose out on money from those who would have been willing to pay even more.
Here's an oversimplified example:
Let's say no one is willing to buy your widget for $100
At $99, 100 people will buy it.
At $98, 200 people will buy it.
At so on, down to 9900 people buying it for $1.
In this case, it is trivial to prove that the optimal price is $50, at which 5000 people buy it, for a total revenue of $250k.
Using the same logic to show a comparison between a blockbuster and a bomb:
Let's say the blockbuster and bomb both cost $10 million to make and $1 per viewer to distribute. The blockbuster will draw one million people for every dollar below $20 on the ticket price. No one's particularly eager to see the bomb, and even those that are will wait for it on DVD if the ticket costs more than $15. So let's say the bomb will draw only 200k people for every dollar below $15 on the ticket price.
The blockbuster's optimal price comes out to $10.50 at which it draws 9.5 million people, for a revenue of $99.75 million, with costs of $10M (fixed) + $9.5M (distribution), resulting in a total profit of $80.25M.
The bomb's optimal price turns out to be $8, at which it draws 1.4 million people, for a revenue of $11.2 million, minus $11.4 million in total costs, ending with a small ($200k) loss.
But if the bomb tries to charge the same as the blockbuster ($10.50), it only draws 900k people, for a revenue of $9.45M, minus $10.9M in costs, ending with a much larger loss of $1.45M.
In real life the relationship between price and people willing to pay isn't linear, but it is still monotonic (i.e. if you get a million people willing to spend $10 on a movie, you won't have two million wanting to see it for $15), so the same logic applies just with harder math.
Philosophy is of little importance when the policies libertarians support would have the opposite effect. Libertarians are always pushing for smaller government and fewer regulations, which would have the effect of making large, wealthy businesses even more powerful.
But they're not replaced all at once, which is an important difference. If our conscious selves are indeed complex patterns in our brains, then those patterns can survive having parts changed out, a few molecules at a time. But if you destroy the brain altogether, the pattern stops. The fact that an identical copy of the pattern was created ahead of time makes no difference. Your pattern has ended.
For an analogy, if I'm running a program on my computer, the states of various nodes in the CPU are constantly changing. But if I power cycle the computer, that instance of the program is over, because it can't survive having everything blanked at once. Having a copy of the same program running elsewhere doesn't change anything.
Look mods, I'm going to make if very simple for you, since I don't want to see this lie spreading any further.
Here is a link to roman_mir pointing to the specific text that concerns him.
Here is the text, copied directly from his post, emphasis his:
SEC. 1031. DEFINITION OF INDIVIDUAL DETAINED AT GUANTANAMO.
In this subtitle, the term `individual detained at Guantanamo' means any individual who is located at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on or after March 7, 2011, who--
(1) is not a citizen of the United States or a member of the Armed Forces of the United States; and
(2) is in the custody or under the effective control of the Department of Defense.
He is concerned that this section was seemingly removed. He claims that it was removed at Obama's insistence and that it allows American citizens to be detained indefinitely.
Here is the link to the full text of what was passed.
Here is the text of the definition that he thought was removed. It wasn't removed, only relocated and modified slightly. Originally the term "individual detained at Guantanamo" was defined in its own section. In the final version of the bill, they moved the definition to a subsection of the section talking about the detainees. You can check the text of the bill inside the link if you don't believe me.
SEC. 1028. REQUIREMENTS FOR CERTIFICATIONS RELATING TO THE TRANSFER OF DETAINEES AT UNITED STATES NAVAL STATION, GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA, TO FOREIGN COUNTRIES AND OTHER FOREIGN ENTITIES.
(e) Definitions- In this section:
(2) The term `individual detained at Guantanamo' means any individual located at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as of October 1, 2009, who--
(A) is not a citizen of the United States or a member of the Armed Forces of the United States; and
(B) is--
(i) in the custody or under the control of the Department of Defense; or
(ii) otherwise under detention at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
So it is established that roman_mir is incorrect in thinking that this section was removed. It follows that he is also incorrect in thinking that Obama forced Congress to remove the section, since the section hasn't been removed.
Finally, it is worth noting that this is merely a definition of what the term "individual detained at Guantanamo" means, and does not authorize any actual detainment. Such definitions are common in legal writing. So even if roman_mir had been right about the definition being removed, it would not have had the implications he is claiming.
Hopefully this makes it clear to moderators and readers alike that roman_mir is completely off base in his statements. In an ideal world, moderators would check the facts for themselves before handing out informative mods, but since that's not happening here, I'll try to make it all concise enough that even the laziest mod can see the truth of the situation.
Your rebuttal comes down to your lack of reading. You saw that the part where they define a Gitmo detainee was "removed" and panicked, but they actually just moved that definition to Section 1028(e)(2).
Not that that part even matters, since it's just defining what they mean when they say "individual detained at Guantanamo", and does not give any power to detain anyone. It's simply a definition. Legal writing is full of such things.
That's the section you're scared of? That section has nothing to do with what you claim. It's just setting a definition for what constitutes a detainee, for use in future sections. And it's not even removed from the final version!
They just moved it!! It's now located in Section 1028(e)(2). Look for yourself!
You can have a philosophy on specific issues, e.g. "Having a clean, minimalist main page is central to our design philosophy". An overarching philosophy gets applied to everything, from the webpage to the cafeteria.
The sum total of Tea Party protests covered a span of time equivalent to maybe one week worth of Occupy.
Are you really going to try to deny that crimes occur wherever people are? Please, tell me where this utopia you reside in is, so that I can move there myself.
You are a lunatic, as I said in the other thread. The thing you are claiming Obama forced them to include is not in the bill at all. Here's the post again, since I don't feel like retyping it all. The full text of the bill is linked, and I provide references to the specific sections of interest. Moderators are encouraged to read the section for themselves before judging the truthfulness of what this paranoid guy is claiming.
Because then the Republicans would run ads about how he vetoed a bill to provide health care to wounded soldiers, or body armor to troops on the front lines. And those ads would be technically truthful, since all those things are part of the bill. And the drooling masses that make up the majority of the American electorate would see those ads and be convinced, because most people are too lazy to do research.
You're completely wrong.
"The FBI, CIA, Federal Marshals, military, and all the other executive apparatus of the nation report to secretaries HE appoints (with fairly rubber-stamp Senate approval),"
That approval has been anything but rubber stamp these days. The GOP has used various procedural tricks to block nearly half of Obama's appointments, forcing several key agencies to be left leaderless for years.
"The Congress can't order Obama to keep Guantanamo open. But he could close it tomorrow if he wished."
Wrong. They added language to the NDAA stating that absolutely no money can be spent moving the detainees from Gitmo to other places. Since the prison can't close while there are people there, the prison can never close, and there's nothing Obama can do about it. Sure, he could try to veto the NDAA, but that would mean that the entire United States military would be forced to shut down. Can you imagine the campaign ads? The Democratic Senators sure can, which is why they would override his veto.
The problem is there are lots of crazy people in the world, and we don't have enough time on this planet to refute every bit of nonsense they spew. Fallacies like the argument from authority or the ad hominem make for bad logical proofs, but they're necessary in day to day life.
I can't prove a square has five corners by insulting your mother, but if the wino on the street corner tells me the end is nigh, I'm not going to bother listening to his arguments. You shouldn't believe me if I say 2+2=5 just because I wave around a diploma, but every time you cross a bridge, you're trusting in the authority of those who built and checked it without bothering to check their work.
If Stallman comes across as a nutjob, no one will listen to him. And why should they? There are tons of nutjobs in the media, and you'd die of old age before you could listen to and analyze everything they had to say.
Look, crazy person. The law does not contain the very thing that you are claiming that Obama forced them to include. If I say that Obama forced the Sun to turn purple, and you look at the sky and see it is yellow, would you believe me?
Here's the full text of the law.. The part you are concerned with is Section 1022.
Part A lets the military detain suspected terrorists if they:
A) Are a member of Al Qaeda or associated group that works in coordination with Al Qaeda
AND
B) Has planned or participated in an attack or attempted attack against the US or its allies
This section was modified to allow non-Al Qaeda terrorists to be detained so long as the current president writes a letter to Congress explaining why that person is dangerous.
READ THIS!!!
READ THIS!!!
However, it is still restrained by Part B which prevents the entire section from being applied to US citizens.
READ THIS!!!
READ THIS!!!
Did you read it? Check the law yourself. It is right there, in plain English, black and white, iron clad. This law does not apply to US citizens.
Now go take your meds, and stop spreading lies. I shouldn't need to do your homework for you.
The Tea Parties carried guns, waved signs about "watering the tree of liberty with blood", and cheered for "second amendment solutions". To claim that they're nonviolent is absurd.
By contrast, crimes were committed at Occupy sites. Guess what? Crimes are committed wherever people are. You can't have a big crowd in one place for a long time and expect it to be crime free.
In one case, violent imagery is a part of who they are. In the other case, violent crimes happened where the protests were occurring, but had nothing to do with the protesters' message. It's a pretty important distinction, and one that many (biased) people like to overlook.
The reason Gitmo is still there is because the Republicans blocked his efforts to close it. He's not a dictator and he can't simply rule by fiat -- even though his critics like to accuse him of doing so.
The Republican game plan for the past several years has been to use the power of Congress to keep him from doing what he wanted to do, and then accuse him of lying when those things didn't get done. The fact that so many people are stupid enough to fall for it is astounding.